Maternity & Midwifery Forum

Normal Birth

Midwifery Feature Articles

It’s Kick-Off on Maternity

Paul
Kick off on maternity
A weekend announcement of £2 million for an RCOG review into preventing brain injuries during birth looks like a smart pre-emptive announcement ahead of today’s publication of the long awaited Select Committee report into Safety in Maternity Services. A few weeks ago NHS England announced £96 million more on maternity......
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Videos

Where are we going? Promoting normality versus over-using technology

Paul
Professor Cecily Begley, Chair of Nursing & Midwifery, School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin gives a presentation discussing “Where are we going? Promoting normality versus over-using technology” at the All-Ireland Maternity & Midwifery Festival 2020....
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Midwifery Sector News

“It’s not really about safety, it’s about fear.” – Normal Birth… what’s going on?

Paul
Disproportionate levels of bullying and racism in obstetrics and gynaecology
Across the world, rates of caesarean section and other interventions in labour and birth are on the rise. Worryingly, however, birth outcomes for mothers and babies are not improving in a clearly correlative way. In fact, maternal mortality in the USA has risen in recent years despite the country having......
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Midwifery Sector News

Midwifery a global update, what this means for normal labour and birth

Paul
Photo by Zach Lucero on Unsplash
At the World Health Assembly this year, 194 member states agreed unanimously to put nursing and midwifery at the centre of achieving Universal Health Coverage. It’s a first in world health. They also declared 2020 ‘the Year of the Nurse and the Year of the Midwife’ and pledged to focus......
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Midwifery Sector News

Optimizing the use of Caesarean Section

Paul
In October 2018, The Lancet published an epidemiological report   on global use of caesarean sections – it put the UK figure at just over 26% of all births.  This comes, perhaps not coincidentally, at a time when tokophobia (the extreme fear of birth) seems to be on the rise.......
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Midwifery Sector News

Normal Birth…What’s going on?

Paul
In most contexts, ‘normal’ is a boring word – but within the world of maternity and midwifery it is a contentious one. Between them, Sheena Byrom OBE and Professor Soo Downe OBE have some 75 years of experience in midwifery practise.  Many of those years have been spent actively researching......
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