[ZacharyPitts]

Also related and shown in the diagrams in the linked article, why are so many babies born on Friday, and less on Saturday? Doctors/nurses want their weekends too, so inducements / c-sections also go up on Fridays.

Says the dad of the child born at 4pm on a Friday...

[Xeoncross]

An unfortunate side effect of the US hospital business is that you have a large number of customers and have to push people through the system as quickly as you can. That's probably why there has been such an increase in birth centers for mothers who want the time to go through labor naturally.

[blfr]

Nah, in completely socialized systems doctors and nurses also usually want to have weekends and evenings off, hospitals aren't staffed as well as during business hours, and people try to limit the workload on their colleagues remaining on duty.

[mahogany]

The contrast to "the US hospital business" is not necessarily "socialized systems". A better contrast is, as the original commenter pointed out, birthing centers (or home births). A contrast to a hospital OBGYN in the US is a certified nurse midwife.

[bombcar]

Even midwife systems often end up with a "ball of midwives" where you may not even know who you're going to get, and then they go off the clock at 6 PM and someone new steps in.

Everything is a cost/benefit/availability tradeoff, and time is just one of the many variables that are being juggled.

Of course, if you have money to throw at the problem you can reduce the other issues.

[Xeoncross]

As far as I'm aware, the majority of US midwives (or CPM's) are not hospital nurse midwives. They do not go off-the-clock, though they sometimes have multiple patients due at the same time so you might still find a backup midwife is covering for your primary care provider.

[bombcar]

I'm sure it varies from birth center to birth center - one would have the midwife scramble at any hour of the day or night to get into the room, the other we used had the ball.

I can see the advantages to the ball but the first was overall better I feel (but there are so many variables it's hard to really tell). We've technically never had the doctor/midwife "assigned" on-hand during the actual delivery for various reasons.

[gowld]

Kind of a circular argument to say that we are seeing an increase in birthing centers because the practice of medicine in recent years reduced the use of birthing centers.

[tylergetsay]

I wonder if this is correlated at all with the fact that ERs are much busier on the weekend