Are we prepared enough for more Home Births ?
Introduction
Since last 4 years, the dutch government has increased emphasis on more and more people adopting home births. According to some people, they feel they are being pressured to have home birth. The Netherlands is a strong economy, developed country, so it makes you wonder that ideally, the country should be having a fantastic healthcare system, yet the government implements ways to keep people away from medical care. This also brings us to the question, are we ready to have increased home births. Do we have enough support system and facilities ?
Not just home birth, you can take example of visit to emergency room. Even the most urgent and severe conditions are rerouted to a longer path where the first intention is to send the patient home or avoid treatment for few days. This raises major concerns such as: Is the healthcare system crumbling ? Does the government not want to invest in better healthcare ? When there are no budgetary issues, then why the government evades having better equipped care centres with ample resources to provide timely and much needed medical attention ?
The Direction
All these questions, set me up on a journey to obtain better understanding of the current healthcare infrastructure, proposed future advancements and what the end users feel about the whole situation. To satisfy my curiosity, I started off with first creating a well defined map about how and from where I am going to gather information. To achieve that, I etched out my main research question, to which i seek the answer. Then I proceeded to draw up my research subjects and who is going to be my research population. I chose to begin my research from the primary end user. Following is entailed the insight about the current system as per my research population.
The new and expecting parents have mostly their joys and excitement overshadowed with concerns such as how to manage the birth, which daycare to opt for, whom to seek for routine questions, how to tackle the problem of postpartum in the current era of nuclear families. Especially the first time parents, in the current nuclear family setup, want to do everything right and are extra cautious during the pregnancy and after the child birth. Similarly, the friends and family are showing keen interest and attentive participation to assist the expecting parents and new parents, as much as possible.
The healthcare professionals welcome the move of more emphasis on home births. They expect more exposure and wider demographic of their existing services. The Government has announced more daycares, introduction of multilingual care providers, cheaper daycare facilities and increasing the capacities of daycare centres.
Insights
- The research population has unified view of more acceptance towards Home Births.
- Parents, friends and healthcare workers are not confident with existing infrastructure to aide home births.
- This is a big information vacuum and absence of explanatory guidelines to streamline the process.
- Postpartum is still not getting the spotlight it deserves, thus the problem is on the rise.
- More private entrepreneurs seek to enter healthcare but the compliance and government policies are too complex and exhaustive, many times defeating the end goal.
- Parents, friends & family and the healthcare workers seek more options in the open market.
Data Collection
All the information was gathered by personal interviews, expression observations, participative deductions, direct and indirect discussions and random encounters. These measures allowed the data to be collected when the subjects were in different environment settings, thus leading to a wide range of inputs in formal as well as informal demeanour. Interestingly, there are 68 government investment schemes to motivate young entrepreneurs. Ranging from Open risk investment to Zero security investment, Future innovation investment to New company facilitation investment. A total of 387 entrepreneurs who applied to these schemes during 2023-2024, none of them received investment. The government representatives when questioned, why these schemes are not intended to provide any facilitation, while investing so many resources in management of these schemes, the blame gets shifted on provincial domination fight amongst regulatory bodies.
Current Challenges
The study of the information led to the deductions that the present environment is non-supportive for innovation and infact demotivates young entrepreneurs. The compliance and support system is so complex and non-result oriented that either the entrepreneurs give up or change their interest or look towards other countries. The parents have hard time finding a daycare and then have to compromise on sanitary conditions and increased risk of exposure to infections for their new-borns. There are many educational institutions preparing midwife candidates every year, the number is actually rising. Despite that, no focus is given on creating ample jobs for them. They end up doing alternate professions to earn livelihood.
Proposed Solutions
The government can take inspiration from developing countries, which inspite of high population and weaker economy, are emerging as forerunners in healthcare. Many countries create Special Economic Zones to infuse increased entrepreneurship by allocating benefits such as reduced taxation in previous years, subsidised electricity and water bills for commercial complex, marketing support centres and public outreach programs. Healthcare workers should have the possibilities to extend their counselling services in a flexible format. More focus on developing daycare talent. Introduction of private organisations to manage healthcare consultations. Removal of non-functioning and non-result oriented schemes from public platforms. They only serve to waste time, waste resources of entrepreneurs as well as government, derail the focus from main business idea and lead to demotivation.
Conclusion
In 2024, 4300 companies declared bankruptcy in The Netherlands. This is an alarming figure for a country with 17.88 million population. Whereas India had 4270 bankruptcies when its population is 1.438 billion. The Netherlands has 1 doctor for every 256 people, India has 1 doctor for every 836 people, yet the waiting times are 184% better in India. As a thought leader, I feel the government should not create challenges for entrepreneurs, rather work with them. Many of them don’t even seek monetary support, but the complex maintenance of formal structure eats up many good ideas. If Siilo from Amsterdam can become leading diagnostic sharing platform amongst healthcare professionals in entire Europe. It means there is caliber, willingness, practicality and zeal to improve the healthcare, only if the bureaucracy stops challenging innovation.
