This website is intended for healthcare professionals
This website is intended for healthcare professionals
Labour pain is complex and multifaceted, existing within an individual perception and context, and arising from individual physiology, psychology and cultural perspectives Notions of ‘normal labour’...
In December 2016, a BBC News item (Briggs, 2016) summarised an academic article by a team of Austrian theoretical biologists with the headline: ‘Caesarean births “affecting human evolution”’
Better Births, the report of the National Maternity Review (2016), set out its ambition and advanced recommendations that, if implemented, will transform maternity services in England
In recent weeks, maternity professionals and service users have rallied in support of independent midwives, after the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) decided that the indemnity scheme provided by...
Over the last 10 years, the prevalence of major postpartum haemorrhage (PPH), defined as over 1000 ml (Mavrides et al, 2016), has increased greatly An audit of three independent UK units showed...
Childhood immunisation is a key tool in health protection and disease control used by the government to discharge its obligations under the European Social Charter 1961, Article 11, which requires...
Pre-registration midwifery education not only prepares students to be competent and confident on registration, it is also the start of their journey as lifelong learners in order to ensure their...
Maternal sepsis is now the leading cause of direct maternal death in the UK (Knight et al, 2015), as well as being a major cause of maternal death and morbidity worldwide (Bamfo, 2013) Arulkumaran and...
Second-trimester miscarriage is defined as pregnancy loss after 12 weeks' and before 24 weeks' gestation (Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, (RCOG), 2010) An Irish study found the rate...
Breast milk not only protects the baby from infections and diseases, but it is also thought to predispose a person to good health over his/her lifetime (Varaei et al, 2009) There is a wealth of...
In the UK, only a small number of women have a homebirth Recent birth figures report that, on average, 23% of women gave birth at home in England and Wales (Office for National Statistics (ONS), 2015)...
Zuo yuezi (ZYZ)—which, by direct translation, means ‘sitting the month’ or sometimes ‘doing the month’—is a traditional Chinese practice of confinement and convalescence for women for a full month...
Midwives are responsible for undertaking a preliminary examination of the newborn at birth to ascertain any obvious signs of abnormality and, thereafter, to undertake a daily examination in accordance...
Approximately 25% of pregnant women in the UK have their labour induced (Kelly et al, 2013) At a national level, it is recommended that women be offered a membrane sweep to avoid the need for...
The generation of knowledge in midwifery arguably occurs through a kind of ‘storytelling’ rather than through scientific facts, but the prevalence of scientific knowledge has come to dominate...
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