Military hospitals perform 'statistically worse' for some measures of childbirth care

More than 50,000 babies are born each year in military hospitals, and while most are delivered without major complications, the recent Pentagon military health system review found that for half the measures used by the National Perinatal Information Center to compare quality of care, the military is failing infants and mothers. In good news for children born in the military's 56 major medical centers, the facilities have statistically lower rates of infant mortality and maternal trauma than the NPIC averages. But for other measures — postpartum hemorrhage, neonatal trauma and readmission to the hospital after birth for both moms and babies — military hospitals are performing "statistically worse" than national averages.