WHO issues new guidelines to curb surge in caesarean sections

In its new norms, the health organization has called for elimination of the one centimetre per hour benchmark

February 15, 2018 09:16 pm | Updated February 16, 2018 06:41 pm IST - Geneva

Doctor checking health belly status of Indian pregnant mother.

Doctor checking health belly status of Indian pregnant mother.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday said it has revised a benchmark used by health professionals worldwide in caring for women during childbirth because it has caused a surge in interventions like caesarean sections that could be unnecessary.

Since the 1950s, a woman progressing through labour at a rate slower than one centimetre of cervical dilation per hour has been considered “abnormal”, said Olufemi Oladapo, a medical officer with the World Health Organization’s department of reproductive health.

When doctors and other care providers confront labour moving slower than that rate, “the tendency is to act”, either with a caesarean section or with the use of drugs like oxytocin that speed up labour, leading to the “increased medicalisation” of childbirth, he said.

In its new guidelines, the WHO called for the elimination of the one centimetre per hour benchmark.

“Recent research has show that that line does not apply to all women and every birth is unique,” Dr. Oladapo told reporters in Geneva.

“The recommendation that we are making now is that that line should not be used to identify women at risk of adverse outcome,” he added.

While rates of interventions like c-sections vary among regions, WHO has seen what it considers a worrying rise in such practices worldwide.

Interventions that were once used to manage complicated childbirths have become commonplace, the agency warned.

“Pregnancy is not a disease and child birth is a normal phenomenon, where you expect the woman to be able to accomplish that on her own without interventions,” Mr. Oladapo said.

“However, what has been happening over the last two decades is we have been having more and more medical interventions being applied unnecessarily to women and we have situations where several woman are getting too many interventions that they do not need.”

While cautioning against any one-size-fits-all benchmarks, the new WHO guidelines say that for a woman delivering her first child, any labour that does not extend beyond 12 hours should be considered normal.

For a subsequent pregnancy, the figure drops to less than 10 hours.

0 / 0
Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.