Nursing and Childbirth

klone, MSN, RN · Jan 23, 2021

Depends on the facility. If it's a larger facility that has 24/7 hospitalist coverage, they typically don't. When I was a new nurse, I worked at a facility that did not have coverage, so part of orientation was "emergency RN delivery" drills. It's definitely something all labor RNs should be familiar with, just like they should become familiar with their role in a perimortem C/S.

Mary3010 · Jan 23, 2021

5 hours ago, klone said:

"emergency RN delivery" drills.

That’s interesting! So would an emergency nurse (or any other) be required to learn how to deliver a baby just incase they may need to?

klone, MSN, RN · Jan 24, 2021

Sorry, by "emergency RN delivery" I meant "emergency delivery by an RN," not "ED RN delivery." The RN doing the emergency delivery would be the L&D nurse (of course, it sometimes happens down in the ED, but they will usually call L&D in a panic and the L&D nurse will come down. And EDs always have a provider present, so they would most likely be the one managing the delivery, not the nurse.

Editorial Team / Admin · Jan 24, 2021

17 hours ago, Mary3010 said:

So would an emergency nurse (or any other) be required to learn how to deliver a baby just incase they may need to?

Klone's answer above is probably most common; however, there would be some outliers. My current facility has a separate hospital for labor and delivery and there is no unit at the main hospital. However, we have at times had patients from out of town not realize they're at the wrong building deliver in the ER or patients who come in as a trauma need to be delivered as a life-preserving measure. We have a perinatal response team consisting of a small percentage of ER nurses, ER docs, peds, and trauma surgeons who are responsible for these patients while an L&D team, OB doc, and neonatologist are transported via ambulance from the maternity hospital to the main hospital. They don't always make it in time for delivery, so the ER docs and RNs cover the lady partsl deliveries and the trauma surgeons and OR staff cover the c-sections.

Michellelizz · Jan 26, 2021

I work at a high volume hospital, doing around 5000 births/year with an OB in hospital 24/7 and a 2nd on-call. And yet, us RNs do deliver babies pretty often, mostly due to the OB being in another delivery/or in the OR and women coming in fully dilated and there’s no time. We obviously try not to since an OB is trained better for complications but it happens.

klone, MSN, RN · Jan 26, 2021

8 hours ago, Michellelizz said:

I work at a high volume hospital, doing around 5000 births/year with an OB in hospital 24/7 and a 2nd on-call. And yet, us RNs do deliver babies pretty often, mostly due to the OB being in another delivery/or in the OR and women coming in fully dilated and there’s no time. We obviously try not to since an OB is trained better for complications but it happens.

With that many births, I'm surprised you only have 1 OB hospitalist! When I worked at a facility that did that many births, we typically had 2 CNMs and 2 OBs in house at all times.

With that high volume, don't you run two ORs at the same time?

Michellelizz · Jan 28, 2021

On 1/26/2021 at 7:45 AM, klone said:

With that many births, I'm surprised you only have 1 OB hospitalist! When I worked at a facility that did that many births, we typically had 2 CNMs and 2 OBs in house at all times.

With that high volume, don't you run two ORs at the same time?

I wish we had 2 OBs but we just call in the second on-call if we need. We’re a teaching resident so we tend to have a lot of residents which can also be helpful.

We have 3 ORs on our unit. In terms of booked c-sections, we usually have 3 or 4 in the morning every day and just do them back to back. If there are multiple emergency c/s at the same time, we just figure it out. We also have our own anesthesiologist.