Health insurers opening "maternity hotels" to address newborn care disparities
Health insurers in the Netherlands are opening 14 new “maternity hotels” spread across the country to try to address disparities in maternity care caused by a shortage of healthcare professionals. At these hotels, located largely in hospitals, but also some in regular hotels, parents and newborns can receive professional care, AD reports.
The new locations are an initiative of health insurers Zilveren Kruis, VGZ, CZ, and Menzis, and the Maternity Care Partnership.
Maternity care has been under pressure for quite some time. In December, maternity nurses warned that many women are receiving less maternity care than they are entitled to or need. In March, the Health and Youth Care Inspectorate reported that this particularly affects women in vulnerable situations and in poorer neighborhoods.
In June, another study found that infant mortality is almost twice as high in some poorer neighborhoods as the Dutch average, though the researchers did not link this specifically to disparities in maternity care.
The health insurers hope that the maternity hotels can help decrease these disparities. According to the insurers, consolidating care for multiple mothers and babies at such central locations offers an advantage over in-home postnatal care, as has been the common practice in the Netherlands for decades. Available nurses can be deployed more efficiently because travel time is eliminated, for example.
Some of the new maternity hotels will be temporary facilities; others will remain open permanently. They’ll mostly be housed in hospitals. But in some locations, health insurers also rented actual hotel rooms to care for parents and their babies.
