About Birth Bridge
Birth Bridge exists because a planned home birth that moves to hospital arrives with a clinical handover and no record of what the woman wanted. This page says who builds it, where the content comes from, and what it has not yet had.
What it is
A free tool for working out, in advance, what you want to happen if your home birth moves to hospital. It asks about sixty questions, one at a time, in any order, and turns your answers into three documents you print yourself:
- For Care — a clinical directive laid out the way a ward reads, with your name, due date and hospital repeated on every page.
- For Us — a one-page brief for your partner and support people, built from your own answers rather than written generically.
- For Me — a copy to keep.
It works in nine regions. Choosing where you are giving birth changes the spelling, the local drug names, the national resuscitation and vitamin K guidance referred to, and the paper size the documents print on.
Who makes it
One person, working alone. Birth Bridge is not a company, a hospital, a charity or a health service, and it is not connected to any of them. It carries no advertising, no sponsorship and no commercial relationship with any provider or product mentioned in it.
The one link on the site that goes anywhere commercial is to Wattle, which is made by the same person. It appears only after you have started answering, it is marked as ours, and it is never printed on any of the three documents.
Where the content comes from
The questions and the wording of the printed directives were written from published national and international maternity guidance, and from the research literature on transfer from planned home birth. Where a figure is quoted anywhere on this site, it links to the study it came from so you can read it yourself.
The regional content names the body that applies where you are. The resuscitation council, the vitamin K authority and the hepatitis B schedule all differ between countries, so the tool swaps in the right one.
What review it has had, and what it has not
The clinical content has been through several structured accuracy reviews and has been corrected as a result. Among the corrections: continuous monitoring does reduce neonatal seizures and the copy previously said it changed nothing; there is no routine suctioning for meconium; a retained placenta is thirty minutes with active management and sixty without; deferred cord clamping is at least a minute.
Two things were removed entirely. Blanket advance-consent questions, because a woman cannot meaningfully consent in advance to whatever turns out to be necessary, and the team acts under a duty of care either way. And a line that told clinicians they need not stop to ask, which was both wrong in law where a woman has capacity and the opposite of what this tool is for.
No practising midwife or obstetrician has yet reviewed this tool. That is a real gap, and it is the thing I am most trying to fix. Use Birth Bridge to organise your thinking and to have a better conversation with the people caring for you. Do not use it as a source of clinical guidance, and go through anything it prints with your own midwife or doctor before you rely on it.
If you are a registered midwife or obstetrician and you would read it, I would take you up on that.
What happens to what you write
It stays in your browser, on your device, in local storage. There is no account, no login and no server holding your plan. That cuts both ways: clearing your browser data clears your plan, so print it once you are happy with it.
The share link carries your whole plan inside the link itself. The person you send it to reads it straight out of the link, and it never passes through a server on the way. Treat that link like a private document, because anyone holding it can read it.
The site counts anonymous page visits using Google Analytics, with IP anonymisation on and advertising and personalisation signals off. It counts visits, and your answers stay out of it entirely.
What it will never do
- Ask you to make an account.
- Charge for the documents.
- Carry advertising, or take money to recommend anything.
- Send what you write about your birth anywhere.
- Tell you what you ought to choose.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, or wrong for the country you are in, I want to know. The content changes when a review turns something up, and the version you are on shows at the foot of the tool.