Continuity of Nursing Care and Its Link to Cesarean Birth Rate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: High cesarean birth rates are an international concern. The role of patterns of nursing care responsibility in preventing or contributing to cesarean births has been understudied. Our study sought to identify and describe indicators of continuity of nursing care responsibility during labor and to explore whether any association between these indicators and risk of cesarean birth could be identified empirically using an existing data set. METHODS: We obtained a representative sample of low-risk women giving birth in an intrapartum unit at a university hospital in Quebec, Canada, with approximately 3,700 births per year. To be considered for inclusion, women needed to have been primiparous, carrying singletons in vertex position, and at 37 weeks' gestation or more. All women giving birth over a 13-month period were assessed for eligibility using the hospital's birth log. Data were extracted from the medical records of every second eligible birth, including information related to patterns of nursing care responsibility, maternal and infant characteristics, obstetric procedures, non-health-related risk factors, and type of birth. RESULTS: Data on all variables of interest were available for 467 women. These women were cared for by 1-17 nurses, care responsibility changed hands for them from 1 to 28 times, and the mean length of labor for which the same nurse was responsible for a woman ranged from 10 to 1,045 minutes. After controlling for length of labor, maternal age, maternal height, infant weight, gestational age, induction, type of rupture, and epidural analgesia, the odds ratio for cesarean birth due to number of nurses was 1.17 (95% CI 1.04, 1.32); 1 or more nurses switch per 2 hours (i.e., number of times care responsibilities changed hands), 1.04 (95% CI 0.62, 1.74); and 33 percent or more of the labor attended by the same nurse, 0.74 (95% CI 0.42, 1.30). CONCLUSIONS: An association was observed between number of nurses caring for a laboring woman and risk of cesarean delivery. Estimates of the association of other patterns of nursing care responsibility on cesarean birth were not sufficiently precise to draw conclusions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".