This website is intended for healthcare professionals
This website is intended for healthcare professionals
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...
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...
In my career as a midwife, I have been to many midwifery conferences, but this year's BJM conference was the most valuable It gathered together some of the best speakers in the midwifery profession...
Changes in society, including higher levels of education in the population and higher expectations of health services, have resulted in a belief that risk can be controlled or even prevented, and...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
‘You're going to be a pioneer, aren't you?’ said my vaginal birth after caesarean (VBAC) midwife, Jo, at a clinic appointment when I was 36 weeks pregnant with my second baby
In October 2015, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) Council gave the go-ahead to introduce revalidation for nurses and midwives across the UK The process is now a reality; our online system for...
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...
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...
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...
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