Educating and empowering our mums-to-be on Assisted Birth
Across our Obstetrics Department, our team have been awarded their Acorns Improvement Award for their year-long campaign to improve the process for assisted vaginal birth across our Women’s Hospital. The aim of the project was to improve the experience for women undergoing assisted birth, meaning birth involving the aid of forceps or a ventouse suction cup to ease delivery, by improving our patients understand and involvement in the decision-making process. 
The use of assisted birth is often the result of fatigue, prolonged second stage delivery, positioning of the baby within the womb or suspected compromised that may affect ease of delivery for our pregnant women. To keep our mums-to-be informed, our Quality Improvement Team developed information to share with our women to increase awareness and knowledge of assisted birth.
This included, reason why assisted births are advised, the potential risks involved, available alternatives to instrumental births, their involvement in the decision and an adequate debrief following the birth of their baby/babies.
Dr Surabhi Deshpande, Obstetrician at our Women’s Hospital said:
“It’s really important to us that we keep our women informed about different methods of birth - particularly if this allows us to make this as stress-free and straightforward as possible. Being sure that women have all of the information that they need to better navigate labour is essential so that we can empower them to make their own decisions and feel more comfortable and in control during child birth.”
How was this achieved?
Across September 2021, informative sticker prompts across our wards have been developed for both deliveries in theatre and at our delivery suites for assisted births, showing a visual prompt for our colleagues to remind mums-to-be about why instrumental births are advised, the potential risks involved, available alternatives and their involvement in the decision.
Understanding was measured through a User Survey which helped us to track the successes of the improvements. Our Patient Experience Team supported, approved and developed the survey before sharing this with our patients. The overall figures from the survey that there was an increase to 90% of women ‘mostly’ or ‘completely’ understanding and feeling involved in the decision-making of an instrumental assisted birth.
Following into October, training and promotional materials were provided to our colleagues to better support their ability to help our mums-to-be, to gather a greater understanding prior to their child’s birth.
We'd like to say a big thank you to Dr Surabhi for speaking with us about the initiative, extending our congratulations to our ambitious Obstetrics Department and midwifery colleagues.