Washington State Better than National Average in Birth Data

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics recently released a Vital Statistics Rapid Release Report “Births: Provisional Data for 2016”, highlighting the success of Washington state’s efforts to improve maternal and infant care outcomes. This report presents United States birth data broken down by State, race, age, prenatal care, cesarean section delivery, marital status, preterm and low birthweight births. Washington state data is better than the national average for all metrics in the report presented by State, including prenatal care beginning in the first trimester (77.5%), total cesarean (27.4%) and low-risk cesarean rate (22.5%), and preterm birth (8.14%). Unfortunately, disparities still exist across race. The report can be found here, on the CDC page.