Dr. Shannon M. Clark, MD, FACOG
speaker
82 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Shannon M. Clark, MD, FACOG’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Hi, yeah, I am Dr. Shannon Clark. I am a double board certified OBGYN and maternal fetal medicine specialist. That means after medical school, I did four years of OBGYN residency training. Then I decided to do more training to be a maternal fetal medicine specialist. So that is also known as perinatology or a high-risk pregnancy specialist.
All my patients are pregnant with either maternal fetal complications or both. I've been a faculty in maternal fetal medicine and OBGYN since 2007. And now I'm a professor at a large academic institution. institution. That's my day to day. And I'm actually right now, I'm post call. So I've been up since about four o'clock yesterday morning.
Yeah, I mean, I've been doing it forever. I'm older now and I can tell you the recovery is not as smooth as it once was. We do the 24 plus hour shifts and that's just the lifestyle at this point.
Honestly, I don't think I have a cutoff point because I think that as physicians, especially those of us that are in a surgical specialty like OBGYN and as a high risk pregnancy specialist, we can be on at the drop of a hat. And while we're on call, we may have a chance to rest if things are kind of quiet. I can go from sleeping 30 minutes to being in the OR with someone hemorrhaging.
I can't say that I've ever really felt that I couldn't function appropriately after being on call or being up because we just turn it on. It's the skill set we develop over years of doing this.
48 hours is a lot. I've done 48 hours as a resident back in the day. Not so much now, but I will say it's not only just the lack of sleep, it's being out of your home or being away from your family or being in that high intensity environment for that period of time. Even if you're able to step away and go to your office or go to the call room and take a nap.
you're in a hospital setting or a birth center setting. So I can imagine having someone cover for that period of time in a birth center or in a hospital will take a toll. The most I will do now is probably about 36 hours. And that's very, very rare. But it's not always that I'm clinically active, taking care of patients on labor delivery.
You have to be careful in what you're doing as far as what your call shifts are going to look like. There are some surgical specialties or even medical specialties where they may be on call from home for the weekend, but they're at home. So it's a little bit different. I can imagine being in a birth center setting or a hospital setting for two to three days. That's a lot.
I don't know that I could do that.
It was hard to listen to. It's almost like watching a medical TV drama and you're screaming at TV. But this was real life. And listen, I'm not here to say that giving birth in a hospital is perfect and we have no issues. We do. But my overall feeling is that being in a birth center is for patients that are lower risk. And that means throughout their pregnancy, all the way coming up to delivery.
And if they're getting care in pregnancy that's maybe not what it should be, and then they're delivering in a birth center setting, that just compounds on the potential for complications. With a couple of these stories, I saw red flags in their antenatal care and their prenatal care. And then now they're in a birth center.
I wish that some things had been picked up earlier on and they could have gotten those medical consults earlier on in their pregnancy that were needed. Maybe things could have been avoided. If they're not getting all the information they need, or full transparency, that's not allowing them to make an informed decision. And I feel like that was what was at play as well.
We are choosing to give birth to our babies in this setting. We should be able to trust that what we're being told is the truth and that they're telling us everything we need to know. That's whether it's in a birth center or a hospital setting. But in a birth center setting, the risk are higher because if something goes wrong, time is everything.
Whether it's a maternal complication or a fetal or neonatal complication,
so i just wish that there was more transparency on the providers who are taking care of the survivors i have a lot of feelings about this but again i want to emphasize that i'm not doing this just so that i could say well giving birth in a hospital is perfect and there's no issues there i'm not saying that at all but when someone chooses to be in a birth center and they are considered to be low risk they should actually be low risk because that's what a birth center is for
I want to say that I am not anti-midwifery model of care, as long as it still applies to the patient. They may walk in at point A, being low risk, where the midwifery model of care completely applies. But pregnancy is a dynamic state. You have a lot of physiological changes, anatomical changes. A whole new being is being grown inside of someone's body. And we have to respect that.
And I say this all the time. A lot of things have to go absolutely perfectly for there to be no complications. And there's a lot of room for error just innately by being pregnant. We can't dismiss those, as Kristen said, red flags. And red flags develop, not in every pregnancy, but in a lot of them.
I feel like the stories that I heard on this season, they were being forced into that box where they were low risk. And even though red flags kept popping up, they weren't willing to acknowledge that they're starting to move out of that low risk box. As physicians, we get criticized all the time for dismissing patients.
It also happens in a free model of care, just as it has happened with us OBGYNs who deliver in a hospital setting. We have to understand and respect pregnancy for what it is. There is a lot of room for things to go wrong. We have to listen to red flags when they pop up.
We have to appropriately evaluate them and do what we need to do to manage them in order to ensure the best outcome for both the patient and the fetus in neonate. If we keep trying to dismiss them so that they stay in that low risk box, that's going to do a huge disservice to the patient and their care.
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