Community midwives across north Cumbria now have access to high quality training aids to support unexpected home birth emergencies.
The training aids will be used to create simulations of complex births such as breech birth and postpartum haemorrhage as well as normal birthing scenarios.
Mary Atkinson, practice development midwife at North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust, said “This equipment will help our community midwives to identify and manage potential adverse events that may occur in the home or birth centre settings and help ensure safe patient care. Our midwives are already experienced in managing these situations, which are thankfully rare because we have such a good risk assessment process during pregnancy, but their training and skills will certainly be enhanced with the use of very life-like aids.”
The products, called Laerdal MamaNatalie and MamaBirthie, can be used as a table top demonstration or worn by a patient actor who takes the role of mother and manually controls the training scenario.
Mary added: “The equipment will be used for home birth study days alongside our paramedic colleagues. They are being distributed to the community midwife based in Carlisle, Penrith, Workington and Whitehaven.”
The funding was provided by NHS Resolution and for each MamaNatalie and MamaBirthie purchased here an additional one is being donated to low-resource countries through the Helping Mothers Survive initiative.
Pictured here are Alaina McAdam & Mary Atkinson