Sep 24, 2026 · 20 min · 9 segments
In this Baby Tribe Short, Afif and Anne look at a recent New South Wales paper asking why birth interventions are rising. The study found that so-called cascade interventions, including induction or…
Afif El-KhuffashHost
Anne DohertyHost
Okay, so this paper, it's interesting when you start reading it, the introduction is actually really long.
But when you drill down, essentially the primary objective was to use administrative data from over 1.3 million births in New South Wales and Australia to investigate the role of maternal characteristics, hospital selection and institutional practice styles in shaping the use of interventions so that we can better understand the substantial increases in interventions in recent decades.
Yes, and actually the paper was titled, Why Are Cascade Birth Interventions Rising? And it was a paper that was published recently in Health Economics and Policy.
If you just Google the title, you will get that paper and we will link it in our show notes.
The study actually looked at those outcomes over a 14-year period between 2004 and 2018.
And what it looked at was, it wanted to look at why was this cascade effect happening in low risk, what they deemed to be low risk patients.
And by the cascade effect, they mean the sequence specifically of induction of labour, followed by epidural, followed by either instrumental or caesarean delivery.
And then there was the other group, which I find interesting, which could have had some or all of those interventions in a different order.
Before we start discussing the paper, let me tell you what the actual paper found on the surface.
So it found that low-risk cascade rose from roughly 11% to 26% over the study period.
So effectively, the rate of cascades and interventions in both low-risk women and high-risk women based on this paper was almost the same by 2018.
Okay, so this paper, it's interesting when you start reading it, the introduction is actually really long.
But when you drill down, essentially the primary objective was to use administrative data from over 1.3 million births in New South Wales and Australia to investigate the role of maternal characteristics, hospital selection and institutional practice styles in shaping the use of interventions so that we can better understand the substantial increases in interventions in recent decades.
Yes, and actually the paper was titled, Why Are Cascade Birth Interventions Rising? And it was a paper that was published recently in Health Economics and Policy.
If you just Google the title, you will get that paper and we will link it in our show notes.
The study actually looked at those outcomes over a 14-year period between 2004 and 2018.
And what it looked at was, it wanted to look at why was this cascade effect happening in low risk, what they deemed to be low risk patients.
And by the cascade effect, they mean the sequence specifically of induction of labour, followed by epidural, followed by either instrumental or caesarean delivery.
And then there was the other group, which I find interesting, which could have had some or all of those interventions in a different order.
Before we start discussing the paper, let me tell you what the actual paper found on the surface.
So it found that low-risk cascade rose from roughly 11% to 26% over the study period.
So effectively, the rate of cascades and interventions in both low-risk women and high-risk women based on this paper was almost the same by 2018.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
