Otago District Health Board women's health clinical director Dr Susan Fleming said Dunedin women had a choice of either having their babies at home or at the Queen Mary Maternity Centre in Dunedin Hospital.
Queen Mary was a busy maternity ward and staff were having to simultaneously deal with the needs of ill women, women at high risk, and those having urgent or elective caesarians, as well as women having straightfoward births.
"It is quite a challenge to create a more relaxed, low-risk environment when you have got all these other things happening simultaneously.
"For women who are in labour and don't need to be hooked up to monitors, it is a great advantage for them to be able to wander around the corridors, but here it is busy and it can be a bit scary."
Women in Dunedin should have more options on where to have their babies and the need for a new centre had been talked about for "a very long time", Dr Fleming said.
"[A low-risk birthing centre] is a dream we would like progressed, but it is a challenge for the district health board. There is a lot of pressure and a lot of competing priorities on the health care dollar, so it is a hard job for the board to know where to invest that money.
"Things not seen to be critical get put to the back burner and that is where our needs are sitting at the moment."
New Zealand College of Midwives Otago regional chairwoman Kerry Adams said the college had always argued hospital birthing wards should be left for women who needed hospital-level care.
Coming into a hi-tech unit was not ideal for healthy women experiencing a normal, healthy pregnancy, and there was a lot of research showing the advantages of low-risk birthing facilities.
Birthing in a low-risk unit was essentially the same as a home birth, but people often felt safer in a birthing unit, she said.
Otago has birthing units in Central Otago, Oamaru and Balclutha, but rural women with more complicated needs have to come to Queen Mary in Dunedin Hospital.
