This website is intended for healthcare professionals
This website is intended for healthcare professionals
According to the Centre for Maternal and Child Enquiries (CMACE, 2010: xiii), ‘obesity is arguably the biggest challenge facing maternity services today’ Obesity is defined as having a body mass index...
Around 1/200 births in the UK result in stillbirth and about 1/400 infants die within the first 4 weeks of life (Office for National Statistics, 2015) Those women who experience perinatal loss (as a...
While the report of the inquiry into the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust (Francis, 2013) largely focused on the failings in the nursing and medical professions, it was also a reminder to the...
Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is an asymptomatic pregnancy-related condition normally identified by initial screening followed by diagnostic testing (Carr, 2001) The condition is a risk factor...
On 1 February 2016, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the recent outbreak of cases of fetal microcephaly linked to Zika in South America an international public...
Revalidation is the formal communication with the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) to demonstrate that one has met the standards prescribed for revalidation as a midwife Smart's (2016) top tip for...
Nearly 3 years after giving birth to my daughter, I'm still haunted by the memory of bleeding heavily, alone with my newborn, just 10 days later As I waited, anxiously and in pain, for an ambulance,...
This summer, as the Paralympics GB team soared to success with 147 medals in Rio, a report (Hall et al, 2016) was published which highlights that there is a long way to go in improving attitudes...
Philosopher Mary Midgley (1992: 3) observed: ‘As the gap between professional science and everyday thinking widens, it gets increasingly hard to work out in what sense most of us can be said to be...
In my visits around the UK and to different parts of the world over recent years, I have been struck by how intractable and pervasive the medicalisation of childbirth has become
A former school friend of mine, who had her first child this year, told me about her anger when an obstetrician referred to her pregnancy as ‘geriatric’. Inappropriate though this term may seem...
Perinatal mental health has been lingering near the top of the midwifery agenda for a while—at least in terms of rhetoric—but now some of the talk is being translated into action. The Perinatal Mental...
Last month, I was asked to present at the Local Supervising Authority (LSA) summer conference focusing on ‘the midwife in the dock’, from Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) fitness to practise (FtP)...
MAMA Academy is a pregnancy charity empowering women and midwives to help more babies arrive safely We educate expectant mothers on how to keep healthy, and when they should call their midwife for...
According to Holroyd (1971: 628), in March 1916 the author Lytton Strachey attended a tribunal, seeking exemption from conscription on the grounds of conscientious objection (CO) He was asked by a...
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