Community Birth Initiative

A community birth is a planned birth occurring outside of a hospital setting, typically at home or in a birth center, and is often facilitated by midwives. The goal of our Community Birth Initiative is to improve readiness, recognition, and response to maternal and neonatal emergencies in community birth settings, while strengthening health care systems to ensure safe and timely transitions of care from community birth settings to hospitals.

About Louisiana’s Community Birth Initiative

The Community Birth Initiative was launched in May 2024 in partnership with Louisiana’s free-standing birth centers to build quality improvement capacity and support the implementation of evidence-based best practices. A key component of the Community Birth Initiative is improving the transfer process from community births to hospitals by fostering collaboration among hospitals, emergency medical services, and community birth providers.

This improvement work is guided by a multidisciplinary perinatal transfer workgroup overseen by the Perinatal Commission, which informs the development of standardized transfer protocols to be adopted regionally across the state, reviews sentinel events, and provides recommendations for system-level improvements.

Since its inception, the Community Birth Initiative has expanded to include not only free-standing birth centers, but also:

Community midwives
Doulas
Community health workers
Other partners involved in community births

Areas of Work for the Initiative:

Supporting freestanding birth centers and community birth providers to improve readiness, recognition, and response to maternal and neonatal emergencies in community birth settings.
Partnering with community birth providers, hospitals, clinicians, administrators, and emergency medical service providers to improve community birth transfer processes.

Free-Standing Birth Centers in Louisiana

Under the Louisiana Administrative Code 48:1 Chapter 67, free-standing birth centers are required to participate in the state perinatal quality collaborative, the Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative. Requirements for participation can be found here. A list of participating Louisiana’s free-standing birth centers can be found here.

For more information about becoming a free-standing birth center in Louisiana, visit the Louisiana Department of Health – Health Standards Section.

Participating Birthing Facilities

Baby Catcher Birth Center
Birth Center of Baton Rouge
Saige Birth Center, LLC
The Natural Birth House

Initiatives

The Gift

The primary home for neonatal and mother-baby care best practice implementation, including breastfeeding and parent-infant bonding.

Safe Births Initiative

The primary home for the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health bundle of implementation and perinatal outcomes work.

Obstetric Readiness in Emergency Departments

Supports emergency departments to improve readiness for obstetric emergencies.

Caregiver Perinatal Depression Screening

Supports pediatric practices in screening and establishing referral pathways for caregivers impacted by postpartum depression.