I have a love-hate relationship with birth plans (by any name). Progressive standardisation of care means a woman entering maternity care systems risk being swept along with the current, her body being used to meet the organisation’s goals and priorities, not her own. Women who dare to hope for something different might be told they have “unrealistic expectations of the control they will have over the experience”, as the New […]
If you wouldn’t use runes to decide whether to do a cesarean section, why would you use a #CTG?
I’m not saying the goal of shared decision making is inherently wrong – it’s simply too little and too late.
All aspects of maternity care arise as consequences of the decisions that imperfect humans make, often structured by imperfect guidelines, derived from an imperfect or absent research base.
Most women want to be involved in decisions about their maternity care. Do many actually get what they want?
This is my regular reminder that CTG monitoring is a choice. Write like you believe this is true.
This is what CTG monitoring practice looks like in the Netherlands. How does this compare to where you are?
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 […]
How are we doing when it comes to talking to women about fetal monitoring options and respecting their decisions? #InformedChoice #SharedDecisionMaking #MidwiferyContinuityOfCare #RespectfulMaternityCare
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?
Birth Small Talk 