This is a continuation of the earlier post and is an in depth look at the birth registration data between 1st September to 19th December of G/N ward for 2,737 deliveries.
Before we look at C-section specific data. 47% of the 2,737 births were at private hospitals / maternity / nursing homes. 70% of all C-section and 89% of all forceps deliveries happened in these private hospitals. Another way to look at it is that there are 2.3x more C-sections and 8.5x more forceps deliveries in private hospitals when compared to government ones.
15% of deliveries at Government hospitals are by C-sections. Which by itself just touches what WHO thinks as “ideal rate“. In private hospitals, it’s as high as 38%! Close to half the births in private hospitals are assisted – either by C or a forceps deliveries.
The first two bars are obviously wrong. But, you can see the steady increase in incidence of C-sections by age of mother at time of delivery. The incidence crosses 20% by the time a woman is 25 years. Post 40, no woman has given a natural birth!
The graph below is the most worrying. You’d expect a lot of deliveries between 37-40 weeks. Unfortunately the incidence of C-sections is 30%+ across these weeks. And no one waits beyond 42 weeks.
A quick look by religion. The one Parsi and 2 Sikhs went for C-section. But, in the larger communities, the lowest rate of C-section incidence is among Muslims at 19%.
Finally, the 3 best and 3 worst hospitals by %age of C-sections… 50.9% of deliveries happened in 4 hospitals (total of 202 hospitals) viz. L.T.M.G. Hospital at Sion,K.E.M Hospital at Parel, U.H.C Dharavi and K B.B. Hospital at Bandra. Though they have the highest absolute numbers of C-sections, only 15% of deliveries here are C-sections. This is skewed due to U.H.C Dharavi, where only 1.5% of 184 deliveries were assisted. Close on its heels is Sandhya Nursing home at Dharavi.
The worst among the lot is S.L. Raheja (A Fortis Associate) Hospital and Dr. Shah Garbhasanskar where only 1 of 19 and 1 of 15 deliveries were natural!
Will post an analysis of a different slice of this data soon.
