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Joint Commission to publicly report C-sections

Hospital Safety Insider, March 28, 2019

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Next year, patients and potential parents will have one more metric by which to judge your hospital. Starting July 2020, The Joint Commission (TJC) will publicly report hospitals that have consistently high C-section rates on their Quality Check website.

Hospital’s rankings will be based on The Joint Commission’s perinatal care (PC) Cesarean Birth measure PC-02. Hospitals accredited by TJC are already required to report that data to the accreditor, but this will be the first time it’ll be visible to the public.

TJC will only tracking the number of C-sections done on Nulliparous, Term, Singleton, Vertex (NTSV) births—procedures performed on first-time mothers carrying a single baby that has its head facing down at the onset of labor. The three ranking criteria are:

• ≥30 cases reported in both years
• PC-02 rate >30% for the current year
• Overall two-year average PC-02 rate >30%

Hospitals will be marked with a plus sign (an acceptable rate) or a minus sign (a high rate) next to the PC-02 measure on website. The first round of reporting will come from data gathered in 2018 and 2019. If the numbers remain similar to da-ta collected in 2016-2017, about 20% of facilities will be past the C-section threshold.

In a blog post, Joint Commission Execu-tive Vice President David Baker, MD cited a stagnant C-section rates as the motive behind public reporting. According to TJC, PC-02 rates have remained around 26% since 2010, without improvement. And in 2017, 25% of reporting hospitals had NTSV C-section rates over 30%.

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