Do general practitioner deliveries constitute a perinatal mortality risk?

In recent years local perinatal mortality experience has been on the agenda of most health district management teams. Nationally available data have been criticised for failing to take into account determinants beyond the influence of existing health services such as lethal congenital malformations. In response to local concern about perinatal mortality rate in Oxfordshire AHA(T) the crude data were refined by using simple epidemiological techniques. This failed to show that a high proportion of general practitioner deliveries constituted a major perinatal risk.