Five questions to ask yourself when deciding about fetal monitoring in labour
The type of fetal monitoring you decide to use can potentially have a big impact on your experience of giving birth, how you give birth, and the health of your baby.
EFM
Electronic fetal monitoring
Five questions you should ask about central fetal monitoring
Central fetal monitoring systems are becoming more and more common in maternity services in high-income countries. Once-upon-a-time heart rate and contraction data were printed directly to paper. Increasingly, these data are turned into a digital signal and shown on a computer screen. Digital data are easy to move to a place outside the birth room. With central fetal monitoring, data are moved to a central location in the maternity service, […]
Let’s just pop you on a trace. A reflection on language.
Is it OK to manipulate the information we share with birthing women about fetal monitoring so they do what we want?
Loud CTGs – turn it off!
Sometimes I spot a new research paper and I ended up thinking – well that was something I never really thought about before! That was what happened when this one came my way. I’m pleased someone thought to do this research and I hope maternity professionals can adopt their practice with these findings in mind. How was it done? The paper has the slightly confusing title of “The effect of […]
Book news!
Back in 2022 I wrote a book. Or at least, I wrote the first draft of what I plan will become a book. It doesn’t have a proper name yet – it is saved as simply “The CTG Book” on my hard drive. It has sat there, looking a bit sad, ever since I got to the end of the final chapter. It ended up in the “too hard” basket […]
What stops professionals from using intermittent auscultation?
I wrote this post back in February 2020 when this research was new. It’s a paper I often reference and use in my presentations. I’ve refreshed the post and am sharing it again because I think it contains valuable information. Research published this week by Chuey, De Vries, Dal Cin, and Low (2020) explored facilitators and barriers to the use of intermittent auscultation (IA) rather than CTG monitoring during labour. […]
More on epidurals, fetal heart rate patterns, and caesarean section
Last week I shared two different research papers highlighting a link between epidural use and caesarean section for abnormal fetal heart rate patterns, pointing out that how these things were connected was not explained by this research. An independent group of researchers, based in Italy, have also recently published research in this area, and their findings provide some additional clues about what might be going on (Ghidini et al., 2023). […]
Epidurals and fetal compromise
The journal Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology published two papers back to back recently. Both are from the same research team based in the Netherlands, and both examined the relationship between use of epidural pain relief during labour and the use of unplanned, in labour, caesarean section or instrumental birth for “presumed fetal compromise”. The research differed in the approach used. Together, the papers raise concern that epidural use might […]
It’s complicated…
One of the problems I see over and over again is the over simplification of complexities in relation to fetal heart rate monitoring in labour. Education and clinical guidelines tend to produce what appear to be logical and straightforward explanations and advice when there is a lot of mud in the pond. Here are two examples: In both of these cases the situations are much more complicated (like this and […]
Admission CTGs: Do they improve outcomes?
Today’s post summarises the evidence about the use of admission CTGs.
Birth Small Talk 