Assessing the safety of hospital birth
Asking whether hospital birth is safe is very different to asking whether home birth is safe. What does the latest Cochrane review say?
Tag Archive for ‘caesarean section’
Do bigger women benefit from intrapartum CTG monitoring?
CTG monitoring is often recommended for women with higher BMI. What does the evidence say?
Up is good, down is not
New evidence about the relationship between decelerations, accelerations, and hypoxic brain injury.
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 […]
What is the risk of a baby dying during labour?
New research helps us to see what and where the risks are.
To stab or to tickle: It’s a great question!
There are so many unanswered questions relating to CTG monitoring. I get really excited when I see that someone has plans to answer one of them! Here are details about #FIRSTT
When the CTG is not normal, should you turn on STAN or check the fetal pH?
CTG monitoring is in use during a woman’s labour. The fetal heart rate pattern is now abnormal. As her maternity professional, you know that the positive predictive value of the CTG is low, and want to avoid caesarean section unless it is going to improve the fetal outcome. And you don’t want to misidentify when caesarean section is a great idea and as a result have an avoidable poor outcome […]
What is a medical indication?
Medical indications exist somewhere on a spectrum between being written on tablets of stone, handed down to new doctors by a supreme being on a mountain top – to being completely made up on a whim. What happens when they are misused?
Deciding what to measure and why it matters
Measuring outcomes in fetal monitoring research: there’s more to it than at first glance.
Brain injury and fetal heart rate patterns
We don’t actually know which fetal heart rate patterns predict developing brain injury. Why?
Birth Small Talk 