COMMENT & CONTROVERSY

Access to prenatal records should be instantaneous

“Malpractice risk management: Avoid these common errors in self-defense!” by Claudia Dobbs, MA (April)

Minimal compliance with an antiquated American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) guideline to send prenatal records at least once to the hospital by 36 weeks’ gestation is NOT “an excellent practice,” as suggested by Claudia Dobbs. Such a practice often means that our highest-risk patients—those 12% of births that are preterm—will likely be managed without any prenatal records, especially on nights and weekends. For the rest of our patients, this obsolete tradition leads to the commonplace scenario in which patients are managed with incomplete, outdated records—or none at all.