BirthPlace Lives Up to Name With Its First Delivery
A ground-breaking birth center catering to San Diego County’s poor women delivered its first baby Thursday morning, a boy born to a 19-year-old Vista woman.
Martha Villanueva gave birth to Uriel Garcia Jr. at 7:08 a.m., ending a two-week wait for the inaugural baby at The BirthPlace, 4094 4th Ave.
Sandra Pate, a nurse midwife who oversaw the delivery along with Cindy Dickinson, said Villanueva was the third woman to be admitted to the birth center and the first to deliver there. Two other women had to be transferred to UC San Diego Medical Center because of complications.
“We were all just so excited and thrilled,” Pate said. “We cracked a couple of bottles of champagne and celebrated at the bedside with a toast to the mother and the family.”
The BirthPlace is unique in California because it is attempting to give prenatal care and delivery services to poor women based solely on the Medi-Cal reimbursements that other facilities complain are inadequate.
The center has six delivery suites and plans to deliver 90 babies a month there--equivalent to a medium-size hospital obstetrics unit.
Five obstetricians are in the practice, but they will do only the high-risk deliveries, at UCSD and Mercy Hospital. Prenatal care and BirthPlace deliveries will be done by certified nurse-midwives.
This model for low-cost, comprehensive perinatal care was pioneered at UCSD, which earlier this year backed away from its program as too expensive. UCSD turned its patients over to the BirthPlace clinicians.
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