Yes doulacara and that's fantastic that people have access to that information. But I think we need to go a couple of steps further. Firstly, we need to educate women that they can and should access this information and secondly we need to be able to access private obstetricians' caesarean rates. I'm kind of guessing here but given that public hospitals have a lower caesar rate than private ones, I imagine that the caesar rates for the obs in the particular public hospital would be similar because presumably they have the same sort of protocols and if one ob was doing vastly more caesars than another it would be noticed by the hospital management.

But, I imagine, variances between private obs are not policed by hospital management. So, for instance, the Freemasons Hospital has from memory a caesar rate of about 30% give or take a couple of per cent. My ob works at that hospital and as he is (sorry to be a broken record) the ob with the lowest caesar rate in Melbourne, I imagine his caesar rate is somewhere around 15%. I also know that Lionel Steinberg works at that hospital and he is notoriously anti-intervention too so I imagine his rate is also around 15%. Now for the Freemasons to have a 30% caesar rate that suggests to me that there are a couple of obs working there whose caesar rates are well over 30%, possibly closer to 45%. But unless you specifically ask your ob you won't know. If you just go on the hospital stats, you'd say OK, well I basically have a 1 in 3 chance whereas depending on your ob, the 'chance' may be much, much higher. Again, I don't know this for a fact but I think that's a pretty logical conclusion to draw.

The easiest way to get women more educated about birth stuff is to encourage them to look at caesar rates. That's a very simple message to put out there and it will prompt them to then start looking at the story behind the figures.