#18 - Birth and Haven - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

g. Narrative Attachment to Zoning Text Amendment Application g. A narrative describing your reason for requesting zoning text amendment. Your description should include how you would be impacted by the zoning text amendment. How the text amendment meets the Comprehensive Plan. How the text amendment will impact the zoning and the subdivision code. We request the proposed zoning text amendment to enable the applicant/Owner of the above identifled property to use it to create a sanctuary and asset for the City of Lake Elmo. The proposed use for the property is the “Birth and Haven” which would comprise a birth center and postpartum recovery center for expectant and new parents from Lake Elmo and the greater region to have the option to experience birth and the crucial days and weeks following it, in the calming and peaceful surroundings of the total-63-acre property on the north side of Clear Lake. Birth centers are deflned by Minnesota Statutes as “facilit[ies] licensed for the primary purpose of performing low-risk deliveries that is not a hospital or licensed as part of a hospital and where births are planned to occur away from the mother's usual residence following a low-risk pregnancy” (2023 MN Statutes 144.615). The license is issued by the Department of Health on the basis of an accreditation from the Commission for the Accreditation of Birth Centers (CABC). Standards for accreditation include staffing requirements, personnel licensure requirements, and facility requirements adopted by the CABC and deflned by the American Association of Birth Centers (AABC). An accredited freestanding birth center offers pregnant women an option for a place to give birth in a residential-type setting, away from their own home, where they can have the beneflt of being attended by professional nurses and midwives. Birth centers avoid the use of pharmaceutical and surgical intervention in delivery, with an emphasis on letting the natural processes of birth take place. When a complication that requires more drastic intervention happens for a laboring patient at a birth center, the patient is transferred to a nearby hospital for continuing care. Such intrapartum transfers occur in between 2-10% of birth center births and are most successful when occurring in an integrated healthcare system where the birth center works in coordination with other providers of obstetric care. The Owner/applicant is a physician who is experienced in the obstetric and gynecological fleld and has numerous established relationships with doctors throughout the region. They will be better equipped than most to ensure that patients of the birth center are able to experience a seamless transition to hospital care if this proves necessary during the course of labor. They have also assembled a team including a former president of the AABC, nurses, and midwives, to ensure that the procedures established by the new birth center lend themselves to the best possible outcomes for patients. Women who give birth in birth centers report lower levels of postpartum depression and trauma following delivery than is typical for hospital births. Birth centers are also shown to reduce rates of preterm births, low birth weights, and unnecessary caesarean section deliveries, and the cost of delivering in a birth center is signiflcantly lower than the cost associated with an uncomplicated delivery in a hospital (reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8827343/). For all