New Birth Center to Help Poor Women

A program to help more low-income women get pregnancy care despite a government funding cut was announced by San Diego medical officials Friday.

Poor women with low-risk pregnancies can go through labor and delivery at The BirthPlace, a basic care facility where women will be tended by a team that includes a nurse specialist and a midwife.

Meanwhile, the UC San Diego Medical Center will continue to handle Medi-Cal recipients with more complicated pregnancies.

Medical officials believe that opening the birth center, a low-technology, low-overhead operation, will make it financially possible to provide more indigent women with pregnancy care.

About 4,000 babies a year are born without prenatal care in San Diego County, the highest percentage in California, according to Dr. Tom Moore, chief of Perinatal Medicine at UCSD.

The situation threatened to worsen when the state announced last summer that it would discontinue a $700,000 grant supporting the UC San Diego Medical Center’s 12-year-old perinatal program.

It has delivered more than 140,000 babies to low-income women.

When the grant was cut, the program began operating on a fee-for-service basis funded through Medi-Cal reimbursements, but hospital officials complained that the program was losing money.

The program announced Friday involves the medical center, OB-GYN Consultants, and nine community clinics throughout the county which focus on providing services in a less expensive, community-based arrangement.

OB-GYN Consultants, a private practice directed by Dr. William Swartz, will open The BirthPlace at 4th Avenue and Lewis Street in Hillcrest on March 1.

“By delivering babies in this setting, we hope to expand the services available and at the same time reduce costs,” said Swartz, who is associate clinical professor of reproductive medicine at UCSD.

The center’s perinatal program now handles 90 deliveries a month. Swartz believes that a combined effort using The BirthPlace and the perinatal program will make care available for about 200 women a month.

About half of them would be served at the birth center.

Swartz said there are 20 or more such birth centers in the state but “none of them on this scale.”

He said the quality of care for low-income women will be “at least equal to traditional medical care” for more affluent patients.

Moore praised the program’s capacity to take more indigent women, but cautioned that increased state funding is needed because many women still cannot find medical care.

“We don’t see this as being anywhere near the end to this problem,” he said.