HUNTINGTON BEACH : Homey Labor Rooms Relax New Mothers

When Adriana Montani gave birth four years ago, it was in a typical hospital delivery room setting: bright lights, cluttered equipment, and, as she put it, “a lot of commotion going on all around.”

But when she gave birth Wednesday afternoon to her 7-pound, 12-ounce daughter Alexas, she was surrounded by household furniture, oak cabinetry and diffused lighting. But best of all, she was not hauled onto a gurney for a trip to the delivery room.

Montani is the first woman to give birth in Humana Hospital-Huntington Beach’s new labor-delivery-recovery room where all three phases of childbirth take place on the same bed.

“It looks more like a (hotel) suite,” said Montani, 25, a Fountain Valley resident. “It had a rocking chair, a lounge chair, cabinets, dressers and a bathroom on one side. It didn’t look like a delivery room with all the mirrors and lights.”

Most area hospitals offer the homey delivery room to women who are expected to have uncomplicated births. But the 133-bed Humana only recently added these more comfortable delivery rooms to make the hospital more attractive to new mothers, spokeswoman Rene Fox said.

“We took the old labor rooms and made them labor-delivery-recovery suites,” Fox said. “They weren’t state of the art. The parents needed to be moved from room to room when they were going to deliver the baby and when they were going into recovery.”

Now, the hospital boasts three labor-delivery-recovery rooms.

It was the intimacy and care of these new rooms that persuaded Susan Carter to have her baby at Humana, the 33-year-old Huntington Beach woman said.

At 8:43 p.m. Wednesday, she gave birth to 9-pound, 7-ounce Barbara Ann about five hours after Montani had delivered her baby.

The all-in-one room made her delivery more relaxed because it did not look like an operating room, Carter said. All of the emergency equipment was stored out of sight in oak cabinets.

“It looks like a den,” Carter said. “If you don’t have to have surgery, you don’t have to sit there staring at all the equipment.”