“Integral architecture for maternity hospitals” It is a document of exceptional interest, made at the request of the Ministry of Health by the gynecologist Pilar de la Cueva and the architects Marta Parra and Ángela Müller, integrated into the working group that gave birth to the Strategy for Normal Delivery Care and members of The El Parto Association is Ours.
This document is a support material for said Normal Childbirth Care Strategy developed by our National Health System and represents an extensive and thorough presentation of the organizational and spatial needs of a delivery center, seeking to benefit childbirth with its adaptation normal, which requires privacy conditions respected so as not to be interfered.
To attend a "natural," physiological or "humanized" birth, it is not an essential requirement to have made reforms in the architectural structures. Some obstetrics services favorable to the implementation of the current recommendations in obstetric care practices, sometimes postpone the change in their protocols for several years because they cannot make reforms or are postponed.There is no doubt that a reformed space is more pleasant, functional and adequate, but in the same way a change of perspective regarding the physiology of childbirth allows us to understand that the most important changes are not based on structural reforms but on a change of practices and attitudes that can be performed in any physical space.
In its first part, Pilar de la Cueva, exposes the strategies to use a conventional delivery while respecting the recommended practices in the care of the normal childbirth, without the lack of architectural reforms supposes impediment for a change of protocols and practices.
In their second part, Marta Parra and Ángela Müller give architectural responses to the needs for normal maternity care. Concepts of project or space reform are presented, including maternity references in different centers and countries.
The work, in addition to the more technical aspects, offers extensive information on the real needs, scientifically proven, that a woman has to be able to have a natural birth, in which intimacy has enormous weight, since the interventions that interfere in the recollection process, can be very harmful.
“Integral architecture of maternity hospitals” It is a very interesting text for professionals but also for families who want the mother to have a normal and natural birth in the best possible conditions. You can find it in full on the page of the Parra-Müller architecture studio and on the page of the Ministry of Health. And is that attending a normal birth does not require major architectural changes, but changes in the protocols and mentality of professionals.
