Method to Calculate Nurse-Specific Cesarean Rates for the First and Second Stages of Labor

To date, efforts to safely lower the cesarean birth rate for women with low-risk pregnancies have largely ignored the influence of labor and delivery nurses on mode of birth. This is mainly because of the complexity involved in attributing outcomes to specific nurses whose care had the greatest effect on mode of birth. An additional level of complexity arises from the type of care given to the woman during different stages of labor. In this article, we describe a strategy to designate nurses to births using an electronic medical record flowsheet, and we describe a method to calculate nurse-specific cesarean birth rates for the first and second stages of labor. Similar to physician-specific rates, we found wide variation in nurse-specific cesarean birth rates in both stages of labor, which suggests an opportunity to learn from best practices. Nurse-specific cesarean birth rates by stage of labor can be calculated from existing medical record information, and these rates vary widely across nurses.