The past decade has seen quite a lot written about whether giving birth in water is good or bad for women’s perineums. The UK seems to have been the hotspot for these discussions. In today’s blog post, I’m going summarise a new piece of research that has kicked off another round of letters to the editor. How was the research done? This new, just published trial is the POOL cohort […]
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 […]
With thanks to Maryann Long, CNM, PhD, for bringing Lisa Paine’s work to my attention. I’m always fascinated about how some new ideas “stick” and are incorporated into practice, while others fall by the wayside. Despite having read widely about fetal heart rate monitoring options for the past decade, the Auscultated Acceleration Test never crossed my path. This simple approach seems to have fallen by the wayside. I want to […]
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?
Professor Susan Bewley is a professor of obstetrics with an interest in a great many things. I first became aware of her work many years ago, when I saw her writing about the potential links between the timing of cord clamping, cord blood pH testing, fetal monitoring methods, and perinatal outcomes. Susan recently challenged me to summarise the issues in a blog post – so here we go! Setting the […]
In some settings, women are offered the option of having intermittent CTG use rather than continuous CTG use. This might look something like having 20 to 30 minutes of CTG use every hour or two, with intermittent auscultation used during the time off the CTG. A first look, this seems like it might be a way to reduce some of the downsides associated with CTG use (like the increased rate […]
Last week I posted about a literature review that summarised 47 years of research about women’s experiences of labour. The same research team responsible for that paper, has also just recently published new Australian research (Fox et al., 2024) describing women’s current experiences with fetal monitoring in labour. The paper has been published in an open access journal, so you are able to read the full paper yourself. If you […]
Birth Small Talk 