Medical experts argue there is a need for a drastic rethink towards childbirth education in Australia.
Professor Hannah Dahlen, a professor in midwifery at Western Sydney University, said greater pre-birth education could help to cut the rate of medical interventions during labour.
She said she feared too many women were having unnecessary medical interventions because they were either unaware of their options or were scared about the labouring process.
“Fear is at the heart of why many health professionals are intervening when they shouldn’t, and fear is at the heart of why many women are going into birth terrified.”
Professor Dahlen said it was time for maternity services and people working in childbirth to rethink the way they have constructed parent education.
“I think in some ways what we’ve done is create giant orientation programs to hospital policy and procedure and make sure that women and their partners are very compliant to what we want them to take from our services,” she said.
“It’s time for us to rethink that, and also to think about empowering parents much more, getting them motivated, getting them informed about how wondrous and amazing their bodies are and how capable they are of doing this.”
Professor Dahlen and Dr Kate Levette, an Adjunct Fellow at Western Sydney University’s National Institute of Complementary Medicine, have been conducting a small study to look at how effective antenatal education was.
One of their focuses looked at its effectiveness when combined with therapies such as massage, acupressure during labour, yoga, and or breathing techniques.
Study found a halving of epidural rates
While the sample size they used was too small to offer definitive results, they said they were intrigued by the initial findings and want to conduct a similar study on a much larger international scale.
Dr Levette said by using a variety of complementary therapy techniques, which the women chose themselves during their labour, they were able to reduce epidural use.
“And therefore reduce what they call a cascade of interventions — rates of augmentation during labour and, importantly, caesarean sections,” she said.
“And the other thing that we found was that babies were less likely to require resuscitation.”
Professor Dahlen said she was interested to find out if the results were similar for a larger scope of women.
“The fact that we found more than a halving of epidural rates, a dramatic reduction in almost a halving of caesarean section rates, is really quite striking.
“In all my career… I’ve never seen such dramatic results,” she said.
The study was prompted by the Towards Normal Birth Policy directive, released in 2010 by the NSW Government, after it raised concerns about the high level of medical interventions during labour.
The findings have been printed in today’s medical journal BMJ and have been peer-reviewed.
This post originally appeared on ABC News.
Top Comments
I couldn't agree more with this. In my experience the absolute hardest women / couples to take care of are those who haven't had ante natal education, and second are those who have had poor ante natal education. I'm not saying that every single couple that didn't take classes is a pain in the ass, but it's pretty close to it.
Hospital ante natal education tells you what they want you to know, and not necessarily what you actually should know. Lots of hospitals have policies and procedures that aren't evidence based, but of course they don't tell you that, you have to find out independently.
The study cited above, though small, basically says everything that I've thought about ante natal education since I started sitting in on hospital classes.
Ladies, gentlemen, if you want ante natal education that tells you what you really need to know, get that education from an independent provider. Even better, do the hospital classes as well as the independent classes. The difference will astound you.
And how would you know? :P
I found our ante natal classes to be very useful. They were run by the hospital, no independent classes where I am.
'We' had a bit of trouble during the birth and the classes definitely helped us to have some idea as to what was going on.
I totally agree, I went into my first birth with little knowledge as to how or what I should do to cope. I was only 24, saw a midwife every four weeks for about 10 minutes as I was healthy. I went to the standard hospital tour and that was it. During my midwife visits the actual birth was hardly discussed, I know through the public system they are very busy and overall they do a fantastic job but I felt as though that aspect was seriously neglected. During my labour I was offered no techniques to try and help manage the pain without resorting to pethedine. I actually found the midwives quite dismissive of the pain I was in which made me less inclined to ask their help and didn't exactly give me the best experience. I think if more emphasis was placed on birthing techniques and education more women would be more trusting of the public system and natural birthing. I know a couple of women who have gone private for their subsequent births as they are scared of having a "traumatic" natural birth again and are hoping they'll have to go down the epidural or caesarean route. Obviously this isn't a good thing so maybe an area to look at for the public system?
Obviously it's not a 100% universal experience. I'm really glad that the classes you took helped you guys out :)
Um, my comment actually came across way more aggressive than I intended!
I was trying to agree with you that education is important.
Sorry about that :)