New NICE Guidelines on giving birth

[think about it]

Normally I wouldn't start a thread but this particular subject lies very close to my heart having lost my daughter this year a few days before she was born.

 

The general gist of it all seems to be that NICE are of the opinion that for low risk pregancies, it may well be safer for mums to give birth at home. Up until the day we found out our daughter had died we were smack in the middle of the 'low risk' category and expecting a very normal, healthy little girl,

 

The link to the BBC article is here:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-30206540

 

My views, for what they're worth, are that if we're about to start categorising risk to the extent where people are encouraged to give birth at home then surveillance during pregancy needs to be improved significantly in line with the recommendations made in the Panorama episode on still births earlier this year.

 

Secondly, there needs to be a very clear pathway for women in distress to access more advanced care as a matter of urgency, how that's done (perhaps through training of paramedics / upskilling community midwives to offer pain relief and peri-surgical interventions) I'm not sure but it's clear that for something to go wrong in someone's home could be catastrophic and without proper planning in place the consequences, however real for us this summer are life changing.

[honeybee13]

Hello there.

 

It was good of you to draw attention to this, especially in view of your own problems. I've very sorry to hear about your daughter.

 

HB

[think about it]

Thanks HB, I think it's very much a case of ensuring that other parents don't have to face what we did, to the best of our abilities at least.

 

Regular monitoring throughout pregancy and the use of doppler scans to check the ability of the placenta to support continued growth certainly needs to come before making sweeping declarations of lowered risk through home birth.