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Call 206-386-BABY (2229)
If you'd like to have your baby at Swedish, let us help you find a doctor or midwife. More about types of providers.
Want to have your baby at Swedish?
Let us help you find a provider.
Most people hear about a doctor or midwife they’d like to have deliver their baby, and then they start thinking about hospitals. But you can also do this the other way around. Choose a hospital you like, and then find a physician or midwife who delivers there.
We’ll make that provider-shopping as easy as possible, with three ways you can research doctors and midwives:
- Call 206-386-BABY (206-386-2229) and we’ll help you find a physician or midwife who fits your needs and delivers at the Swedish birth center you prefer.
- Scan the directories of the clinics and providers that serve each Swedish birth center.
Once you’ve found the names of doctors or midwives who sound like a good match for you, the next step is to call their offices. They can tell you about their guidelines for meeting and accepting new patients, and whether or not they accept your insurance plan.
In this Section:
Full text/transcript for "What types of Providers deliver at Swedish?" video
If you've figured out what hospital you want to go to, now you've got to figure out what's the provider that's best for me.
There are three basic groups of providers that deliver at the Swedish system.
The first would be an Obstetrician/Gynecologist, this is sort of what everybody knows. An OB/GYN is going to be able to take care of a patient throughout their pregnancy and take care of pretty much any potential complication that could come up. So, they can take care of a patient that might be high-risk and of course a low-risk patient. Unfortunately sometimes things do come up during a pregnancy and an OB/GYN would be able to take care of them whether they have just a normal delivery or if they end up needing a C-section or some type of assisted delivery.
The second option in the Swedish system, and there's a large number of providers in many of the community clinics and many of the Swedish clinics that are family practitioners with OB privileges. Family practionrs can take care of a patient through any low-risk pregnancy. If the pregnancy becomes high-risk, they might need to refer out or consult with an OB/GYN. If the patient ends up needing a C-section, they'll consult with an OB/GYN the OB/GYN will end up doing that delivery. They can also give continuity of care. They can take care of the baby after the baby's delivered and throughout the child's life.
The third group is Midwifery group and that is a group of women who have done nursing school and have additional training and then done a certified nursing midwifery program. A midwife will take care of low-risk pregnancies. I think they tend to have more time and give more one-on-one care. If the pregnancy becomes high-risk in any way then they would be referred on to an OB/GYN and same with the delivery. If they become high-risk they'll have an OB/GYN that backs them up and takes over if necessary.
A laborist is an OB/GYN that is in the hospital 24 hours a day to back up family practitioners if they need it and even to help the OB/GYNs that are doing their deliveries. When patients need C-sections there's always two doctors available to do C-sections. The laborist can assist on those. So for family practitioners if they need to ask questions, they need to consult or they need to refer to an OB/GYN to do a C-section, they can use the laborist and both First Hill and Issaquah have laborists in the hospital 24 hours a day.