Cardiotocograph monitoring
The third part of a series critiquing common myths about fetal heart rate monitoring. It emphasises that fetal monitoring is not essential for good outcomes, and intermittent auscultation IS fetal monitoring.
Does CTG misinterpretation harm babies? Or is something else going on?
Today’s post shares the back story behind our paper. #CTG #EFM #PerinatalMortality #CP
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A student in my Fetal Monitoring for Maternity Professionals course asked me about this recently – and I realised I had never written about it, despite having promised to do so a few times! This is for Natalie, with gratitude. What is the Dawes Redman system? As an Australia maternity care provider, I have never encountered the Dawes Redman system in clinical practice. Its use seems to be widespread in […]
Fetal monitoring guidelines around the world recommend CTG use in labour when women are considered to be a higher risk for a bad outcome for the baby that is linked to low oxygen levels in labour. Regular readers of my blog will have seen me write repeatedly about the lack of great evidence to back this up. There’s no compelling research showing better outcomes with CTG use for women planning […]
This is the third post in a series I am writing about the Auscultated Acceleration Test or AAT. If you haven’t been following along and don’t know what this test is – you can read about it here. The goal of antenatal CTG monitoring is to predict which fetuses are at risk of a poor outcome relating to low oxygen levels, so action can be taken and therefore avoid death […]
Last week I explained what the AAT was. This week I want to share research that compared one midwife against another, to see if they were able to generate an accurate assessment of the fetal heart rate pattern, and were able to detect accelerations as reliably as a CTG machine. If you missed last week’s post and don’t know what I’m talking about – you can find it here. How […]
Words have power. I know this – the approach I used for my doctoral research requires you to look closely at how language shapes the social world. If you have hung around the birth world for a bit, you have probably made some conscious choices about whether you use the words “patient” and “delivery”. I spend most of my working week choosing which words work best to get the job […]
Why did the Each Baby Counts program not made a difference?
Birth Small Talk 