Birth Small Talk

Fetal monitoring information you can trust

EFM

Electronic fetal monitoring

Does CTG monitoring make labour slower?

There is no doubt that standard “wired” CTG monitoring restricts mobility during labour and favours recumbent positions on the bed during labour (Watson, et al., 2022). I often hear people say that this leads to longer labours, contributing to the rise in caesarean section rate seen with CTG monitoring. This post explores the evidence for this from randomised controlled trials comparing intermittent auscultation with continuous CTG monitoring in labour. Labour […]

Continue Reading →

Who makes decisions about fetal heart rate monitoring and how does it happen?

Myself and my co-authors have a new paper, freshly published with Women and Birth (available here). One of the questions I asked while generating data from my doctoral research was – who made the decision about the approach to fetal heart rate monitoring that any individual woman would use during her labour? At first glance, the answer seemed to be that no one was actively making decisions. I didn’t interview […]

Continue Reading →