Two senior doctors have written to the British Medical Journal to commend them for publishing a recent debate which highlights the way “in which the doctors supporting monitoring seem to cherry pick evidence” (Bewley and Braillon 2018). During this debate,…
When I returned to my desk after the holidays, I read a fascinating piece in the British Medical Journal by Semsarian and Moynihan (2017) who told the story of John, a 32 year old man whose father had given him…
Last month (Wickham 2016), I wrote about a principle that I was taught and have subsequently shared with many other midwives. It involves asking oneself whether offering a screening test would change one’s management, or what one would offer to…
I have found, over quite a few years of teaching midwifery, that people who are learning midwifery and similar arts often like to have building blocks in the form of rules, lists and principles that they can learn and explore…
Here’s an interesting article and some food for thought. An Australian study – which was published in BMC Pregancy and Childbirth and is thus freely available if you’d like to read it in full for yourself – explored midwives’ experiences…
“In my view there are two main issues that hamper the assessment of harms and benefits of antenatal GBS screening. The first is the artefact introduced by using GBS culture-positivity when assessing the outcome of the use of IAP [intrapartum…
The authors of a research study carried out in France have echoed existing concerns that trying to identify small babies during pregnancy may do more harm than good. In a freely available paper published in the BJOG, Monier et al…
I am a big fan of Archie Cochrane, who said many wise things in his lifetime. One of them has become known as Cochrane’s aphorism, and I wanted to mention this as a brief addendum to the page on my…
Are you aware that the vast majority of the things that midwives do during antnatal and postnatal checks and when looking after women in labour are actually screening tests? No matter whether we are checking a woman’s blood pressure, urine…
Researchers in the US have published a paper in Obstetrics and Gynecology questioning the value of carrying out indirect antiglobulin screening on rhesus negative women at 28 weeks of gestation (Abbey and Dunsmoor-Su 2014). In most Western countries, all women…