MEDICAL

Responding to demand for more homelike childbirth settings, both Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian and St. Joseph Hospital are opening the latest in labor and delivery rooms to prospective mothers.

The LDR concept provides private rooms with the comforts of home where new mothers, frequently accompanied by their spouses and other family members, can go through labor, delivery and initial recovery. The LDR concept replaces the traditional arrangement in which maternity patients are wheeled from labor room to delivery room to recovery room in a more institutional environment.

Both hospitals hope that the new service will give them an extra edge in what has become an intensely competitive maternity marketplace.

“This is what young couples in childbearing years are looking for,” said Tes Pane, director of St. Joseph’s obstetrics and gynecology department, which delivers more babies each year than any other hospital in Orange County. “We are out to protect our market share. We don’t want it to go away,” Pane said.

For that reason, she said, St. Joseph today will open three new labor and delivery rooms, joining an existing LDR suite. Because there are not enough rooms for every maternity patient, she said, the hospital will continue to operate four traditional delivery rooms and five traditional labor rooms.

But within two or three years all of the maternity recovery rooms and nurseries at St. Joseph will be transferred to newly renovated floors at neighboring Childrens Hospital of Orange so that the entire obstetrics department at St. Joseph’s can be converted to LDR rooms, Pane said.

Hoag already has transformed its maternity department. On May 9, it will open a childbirth center that includes nine LDR suites with oak floors and Country French designer decor. “But if something goes wrong, we have got two new, fully equipped surgical suites,” said Kathy Cline, Hoag’s program manager of perinatal services.