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Reception of oocytes from a partner

Last year, at the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts, feminist icon Germaine Greer scolded gay parents Sir Elton John and David Furnish for naming Furnish as the mother of their two sons on the...

Building resilience: the way forward

We are all aware that there are many forthcoming changes in midwifery recommended in government policies (Dunkley-Bent, 2016). So how do midwives feel about these, and how might they cope with further...

Missing the point of the maternity review

The new National Maternity Review (NMR, 2016) for England has sparked a range of reactions. As this issue went to press, I read a comment in the New Scientist (Wilson, 2016) which is scathing in its...

Deliberately unassisted birth in Ireland: Understanding choice in Irish maternity services

In Ireland, some women who are unable to access a midwife-attended homebirth are choosing to give birth at home without assistance This paper describes the experience of four such women, whose stories...

The effect of maternal position at birth on perineal trauma: A systematic review

Genital tract sepsis is now the leading cause of direct maternal death in the UK, with the incidence rising since 2006 (Cantwell et al, 2011) Perineal trauma can increase the risk of puerperal...

An audit and trial aiming to reduce the rate of surgical site infections for women having a caesarean section

Although birth by caesarean section (CS) is a common procedure, there are a number of potential complications, of which one is surgical site infection (SSI) (Gould, 2007; Wloch et al, 2012) Mortality...

Urinary catheterisation: Indications and complications

Increasing numbers of women, either during the birth process or in the postnatal period, require an indwelling urinary catheter for a number of reasons This could be because the woman requires a...

Plus ça change: Problems with memory and the importance of documentation (again)

A sure sign of ageing (call it experience, if you will) is the realisation that ‘we've been here before’. In 1997, I published an article in this journal concerning practitioners' recall of events...

Don't tell me I can't change the world

Recently, I had a privilege of attending the British Journal of Midwifery Awards, held in Manchester on 8 February I was even more privileged to be awarded joint 2nd place in the Innovation in...

Clinicians in the classroom: The bereavement midwife

One in 200 births in the UK ends in stillbirth, and of those, 1 in 3 occurs at term (37+ weeks' gestation) According to MBRRACE-UK (Draper et al, 2015: 7), ‘although there has been a small reduction...

Exploring the value of group supervision in midwifery: Part 1

Following the findings from three investigations into complaints from families relating to local midwifery supervision and regulation at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust, the...

Mindfulness in maternity: Evaluation of a course for midwives

There is increasing literature to suggest that mindfulness-based interventions may address a variety of psychological problems (eg Grossman et al, 2004; Dimidjian and Goodman, 2009; Duncan and...

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