Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services

Iqaluit (Jan 10/00) - It's back to the drawing board for Dr. Chuck MacNeil and his plan to see more women give birth in their home communities.

That's because the results of a six-month long study he was conducting in an attempt to evaluate birth risks proved to be inconclusive.

Using existing prenatal forms, which evaluate and monitor the health and risks of pregnant women from conception to birth, MacNeil, a career obstetrician and the director of medical affairs at the Baffin Regional Hospital, said he hoped to find a correlation between low-risk pregnancy and low-risk birth.

He said such a correlation would permit women expecting easy births to stay in their home communities to deliver their babies rather than travelling to Iqaluit to the regional hospital.

But after evaluating obstetrical charts from June to December, he said he came to realize that the records don't actually help indicate which women will have high-risk births.

"From the reviews we've done, this method doesn't help a great deal in determining those moms who run into complications," he said.

"That's disappointing because it means that if you want to determine who the low-risk moms are, we need a better method."

To that end, MacNeil has contacted Pauktuutit, the national Inuit women's association, to learn if they can help shed light on home community deliveries in similar jurisdictions.

"I'm trying to get the criteria for Nunavik, where I understand they're doing some of this. Their situation is not a lot different from ours," he said.

MacNeil noted that all was not lost, and assuming that a more concrete method of evaluating risk can be found, women may still be able to consider having their children in their home communities.

Until that time however, expectant mothers will continue to travel to Iqaluit where they have access to life-saving technology.

Directed to initiate the study at the request of the board last year, MacNeil said he hoped to be able to provide better information to them at their next meeting in February.

That would give them the opportunity to make a recommendation on the matter before they officially dissolve on April 1.