Our Service Promise

Our department will be available to provide safe and effective anesthetic consultation to maximize our patients' experience with labor and delivery.

About Our Program

Kaiser San Francisco is one of the High Risk Obstetric Care Centers in the Northern California Region. Our obstetric anesthesia team is therefore one of the most experienced teams available for obstetric anesthesia care. We have dedicated Obstetric anesthesia providers for labor and delivery. If a patient chooses to have an anesthesia consultation for labor pain management, the obstetrical care team will call the anesthesia provder. In most cases the patient has requested pain management at the time of need, but the anesthesia provider is available at any time during the labor experience to answer questions and provide information as needed. The anesthesia provider will meet with the patient and provide information about the pain management plan. If it is the appropriate time the provider will institute the plan.

The mainstay of anesthesia consultation in labor and delivery is epidural analgesia, or pain control. Throughout the duration of the pain management plan the anesthesia provider will be available to address the continued needs of the patient. If the patient receives an epidural, most of the time the epidural will be connected to a pump with a patient control device. This insures continuous pain management with some patient control and addresses the needs of family privacy. Should delivery of a patent’s baby require surgery, a cesarean section, the anesthesia provider will provide the anesthesia. Most of the time a regional anesthetic technique will be used for surgery so immediate bonding with the new baby may occur. Family may be present at the discretion of the anesthesia provider. After the surgery the patient will be taken to the labor room for recovery where she may be with her family. Should general anesthesia be required, no family will be allowed at the delivery and the patient will be taken to the recovery room after the surgery is finished. Once fully recovered, the patient will return to the labor room to join the family.

Contact Information

A patient may contact the anesthesia department to discuss our obstetric service by calling the numbers provided on this web site.

Hours of Operation

Our Department provides 24 hour service 7 days a week.

More Pain Management Information

We provide labor pain consultation. In most cases this will be an epidural, but we provide a spectrum of pain management services specifically designed to enhance the labor experience. Epidurals are the mainstay of labor pain management requiring more than intravenous pain medications. We tailor the epidural prescription to the specific needs of each patient. We may also provide expert IV medication consultation and other techniques depending on the pain management needs and stage of labor. A common non-epidural technique is a lower back injection of medication into the spinal fluid, sometimes called a saddle block for the areas in which numbness occurs. Fast labor sometimes provides little time for an epidural. Rather than do nothing or offer inferior IV medications, a quick injection of a small amount of medication into the spinal fluid can safely make the last stage of labor pain free. If the patient must go to the operating room for any reason the anesthesia provider is available for immediate consultation. Whether the patient is going to have general anesthesia for a c-section or simply to have a challenging delivery situation, we will be there to provide the appropriate anesthetic assistance.