Immediate Care is the Best Care
You don’t have to be a high-risk patient for immediate OB/GYN care to be a high priority. Perhaps no medical environment has more potential for situations to turn from routine to life-threatening than the Labor and Delivery department. Nobody knows this more than an Ob Hospitalist Group (OBHG) hospitalist. In fact, since our inception, our team of highly-skilled, Board Certified OB/GYNs have performed over 74,000 deliveries, many of which began as routine and ended up anything but. For each one of these deliveries, the presence of an OBHG hospitalist may have meant the difference between life and death. Below are three such deliveries: Pre-term Complications Require a Team Effort At 3:00 a.m., the on-site OBHG hospitalist was alerted to an emergency situation in the Labor and Delivery department. The staff had already transported the patient to the Operating Room (OR) and our hospitalist headed straight there from the on-call room. She was advised the patient was a woman in her 27th week of pregnancy who had been admitted two days earlier by a private OB/GYN for a membrane rupture and a breech presentation of the baby. The patient got up during the night to use the restroom and inadvertently caused a prolapse of the umbilical cord, an obstetric emergency that instantly threatens the baby’s life. The OR was filled with a frantic team working on the patient, with one of the nurses trying to relieve pressure on the cord. They were starting to lose the baby’s pulse. The teamwork was incredibly efficient; the patient was prepped, sedated and ready for surgery. Within minutes an emergency C-section was performed, and the baby was delivered with an amazing 5 minute Apgar of 7-8, very rare for a baby at that gestational age. The OBHG hospitalist credits the entire team and their extraordinary efforts but states unequivocally that had she not been on-site, there’s no doubt that the baby would not have survived the random and tragic turn of events. Prolapsed Umbilical Cord A patient was laboring and 6 cm dilated. Her private OB/GYN was at the hospital but not in the Labor and Delivery Department. An attending nurse discovered an umbilical cord prolapse at 1906. The baby’s fetal heart was only 30-40 beats per minute. The OBHG hospitalist on-site was notified as the patient was urgently transferred to the Operating Room (OR). The patient arrived at the OR at 1910. The baby’s fetal heart rate was noted as bradycardic at 50 beats per minute. The surgical team rapidly prepped for emergency surgery and the incision time was recorded at 1912. The very fortunate baby was delivered at 1913; just seven short minutes from the discovery of the prolapse.
Ob Hospitalist Group
10 Centimeters Drive • Mauldin, SC 29662 • P: 864.908.3530 • F: 864.627.9920 • www.OBHG.com