The hospital's birth centre celebrated its first year of operation at the weekend and the centre's clinical midwife consultant Liz Bishop said it had helped to reduce rates of intervention during labour.

"We've certainly seen that, a lot more normal births, less caesareans, improved breastfeeding rates and satisfaction. We've done a bit of surveying of our women and they're very happy with the service and we're getting good clinical outcomes," Mrs Bishop said.

"For women, it's certainly a much better recovery from normal birth as opposed to a caesarean section and there's quite serious risks associated with a major abdominal operation.

"Emotionally, it's actually a much more empowering experience to go through a normal birth because of all the hormones that are activated through labour and I think we underestimate the importance of those for connecting you to your baby after the birth."

Mrs Bishop said the service had been very popular, but the number of new mothers who could use it was limited by how many midwives worked in the program.

"We'd love to take more women," she said.

"There's a special EBA legislation for how much a full-time midwife can take [on]. Because you're doing the whole program of antenatal, birth and labour and postnatal care, you can only do four a month and not all our midwives are full-time."

She said Calvary Hospital was hoping to expand the service and had applied for funding through ACT Health for an additional four midwives, which would allow the service to take on 16 more women each month.

The service is currently offered only to women with low-risk pregnancies.

Mrs Bishop said the birth centre offered a midwife-led model of care to new mothers.

"The women get an opportunity to meet the midwives as soon as they're pregnant really. We do the first visit at about 16 weeks and meet them along the pregnancy journey about eight times, and it's all with the same midwife who is then on call for them for the labour and birth," she said.

"The [midwife] has already met the woman and established what the woman's wishes are, what her fears are, and that relationship is already developed so that's the beauty of it. That reduces a lot of anxiety about labour and birth that many women have."

Mrs Bishop said the service was led by midwifery staff, but they also worked closely with other health professionals including obstetricians.

Calvary Hospital chief executive Karen Edwards said the success of the birth centre over its first year and the faith Canberra women had put in it had been wonderful.