Families who choose to give birth at home or in a freestanding birth center deserve the best possible care when plans change and they need to access hospital services. Smooth Transitions™ is dedicated to enhancing the safety of these hospital transfers.

Our program began within the Washington State Perinatal Collaborative at the Washington State Department of Health and joined our FHCQ community of improvement programs in 2018. We bring together community midwives, hospital providers and staff, and emergency medical services personnel to build a collaborative model of care that puts birthing families at the center. Improving relationships, protocols, and follow-up during these transfers improves quality of care, enhances patient experience, and strengthens professional relationships among practitioners regardless of the setting and circumstances in which it takes place.

Through an engaged multidisciplinary leadership team, the program aims to:

• Improve whole person safety including emotional, psychological, social, cultural, spiritual, and physical processes and outcomes and the efficiency of the transfer process through the establishment of system-wide protocols
• Collect and analyze transfer outcome data for the purpose of quality improvement
• Build greater collaboration between community midwives, emergency medical services, and the hospital care team for future transfers
• Enhance the patient experience of care when transfers occur

We provide direct support to participating hospitals and are available to consult with perinatal collaboratives and organizations in other states interested in replicating this work. The addition of the Community Birth Data Repository with data collection aligned with the Obstetrical Care Outcomes Assessment Program will help standardize collection of community birth data and reach a greater number of people and Smooth Transitions has recently started collaborating with the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health (AIM) to build a safer birthing experience nationally.

Learn more here.