2022/23 Portland, OR Cesarean Rates
Planning a birth always means deciding where to give birth. Knowing the cesarean rate for a given birth place can be a concern and a decision-making factor in the location of birth but, frustratingly, the numbers can be hard to come by.
That’s why I have crunched them for you, using data from the State of Oregon Vital Statistics, look for Final Method of Delivery by Facility and the year you want to review.
One caveat with these numbers is that since these are the numbers of where the birth finally took place, births that were planned for home or birth center and needed to transfer, are counted in the hospital numbers. Not all transfers to a hospital will result in a cesarean, but some will. In this way, I was not able to determine a cesarean rate for the home births or birth center births because a cesarean cannot take place AT the birth center or at home.
Legacy Emanuel Medical Center continues to have the highest cesarean rates in Portland, but it has come down from 38% in 2021 to 33.5-34.6%.
We would expect to see higher cesarean rates in the hospitals with the highest levels of Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and we do pretty much see that. However, there are a couple of hospitals with level 1 NICUs, Legacy Meridian Park and Legacy Good Samaritan, whose cesarean numbers come in higher than two hospitals with level 3 NICUs, Providence Portland and Kaiser Sunnyside.
OHSU’s cesarean rate is running about 1 percentage points lower than Emanuel’s, while also having a Children’s Hospital and the same high level NICU (level 4).
Kaiser Sunnyside has a level III NICU, but maintained a lower cesarean rate, 27.8% by than its fellow level III NICU hospitals Providence St. Vincent (33.1%) and Providence Portland (30.6%).
Legacy Mount Hood had the absolute lowest hospital cesarean rate in the area at 21.2% in 2023. This was a significant plummet from their 2022 cesarean rate of 30%. Was it a conscious effort to lower the cesarean rate? Or is something else going on?
Tuality Healthcare also had a significant drop in cesareans from 2022 (28.8%) to 2023 (23.8%).
Tuality Healthcare tied with OHSU for the percentage of overall births that are Vaginal Births After Cesarean (VBAC) at 5.3%. St. Vincent saw the most VBACs in absolute numbers, but as a percentage of overall births it was 4.1%. Legacy Meridian Park and Legacy Good Samaritan saw the least VBACs both in terms of percentages and also absolute numbers.
What do these numbers mean to you? Any insights or questions about them?
