The SAPlings project: an alternative antenatal care pathway

Antenatal care in Oxfordshire is predominantly a shared-care model based on the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) antenatal care pathway Care is based in GP surgeries or...

Neonatal resuscitation: ‘room side to motherside’

From the moment of birth, around 90% of neonates initiate spontaneous respiration within 30 seconds (Resuscitation Council UK, 2016) For approximately 10% of neonates, this process takes a little...

Management of first trimester pregnancy loss: mifepristone plus misoprostol versus misoprostol alone

Miscarriage occurs in 20% of all pregnancies (Fernlund et al, 2018) and medical management using misoprostol is now a popular treatment option as opposed to surgical intervention Current research...

How do risk management principles fit in with the reality of clinical midwifery?

Risk assessment and management is extremely important in midwifery However, it is unclear how its principles fit with day-to-day clinical midwifery practice While midwives are the inherent leaders of...

A new tool to assess understanding of Down syndrome screening information presented by midwives

In England, Wales and Scotland, all pregnant women are routinely offered antenatal screening for Down syndrome (DS) at the booking appointment, according to the UK National Screening Committee...

Vaginal birth after caesarean: how NICE guidelines can inform midwifery practice

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence ([NICE], 2019a) published new intrapartum care guidelines for women with existing medical conditions or obstetric complications and their babies...

Congenital heart disease: issues with screening at the newborn physical examination

Congenital heart disease (CHD) is a significant cause of infant death and accounts for between 3-75% of deaths in infancy in the developed world (Singh et al, 2014) For this reason, screening for CHD...

Rainbow Trust neonatal care

Rainbow Trust Children's Charity is an organisation that supports families who have a child with a life threatening or terminal illness It employs Family Support Workers who work with individual...

‘They/them’ in the birth room

New research is required to understand the needs of transgender people in the birth room

Learning from loss for professionals and parents

The forgotten women of gynaecology

The atrocities of slavery in the USA in the 1800s have been well documented, but the development of gynaecological techniques using female slaves has not had the same acknowledgement Within midwifery...

Sociological and psychological effects of stillbirth: theory, research, and midwifery

When a baby dies after 24 weeks gestation, it is defined as stillbirth (Tommy's, 2019) and, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS, 2018), 3 200 babies are stillborn in the UK every year...

Chronic heart disease in pregnancy: exploring Marfan syndrome

Marfan syndrome (MFS) was first described by the French doctor Bernard JA Marfan in 1896 It is a hereditary autosomal dominant disorder of connective tissue and affects collagen and elastin in many...

An interpretative phenomenological study of midwives supporting home birth for women with complex needs

The landscape of women presenting for care in pregnancy now compared to the 1970s is vastly different thanks in part to the development of technologies which support women with comorbidities,...

‘We are just obsessed with risk’: healthcare providers' views on choice of place of birth for women

It is a woman's right to make an informed choice regarding where she wishes to give birth (Birthrights, 2013) Globally, it is recommended that women's individual health needs should be taken into...