This will be of particular interest to obstetric specialty trainees, many of whom will be able to use study leave and have course fees paid (50%) through educational budgets because the course is hosted by the RCOG.
We look forward to supporting more obstetricians, midwives and paramedics to feel confident in their ability to support vaginal breech births, and to provide appropriate hands-on assistance when indicated.
This Monday, we held a training day at St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, London, to support the Imperial OptiBreech Team, led by Consultant Obstetrician Sabrina Das.
OptiBreech Just Giving Page
We will be donating 10% of any revenue obtained from this and all future study days to the OptiBreech Just Giving page, which is raising money to provide sites with extra support so that team members can continue to be on-call for women planning a vaginal breech birth.
We would be incredibly grateful if you would join us in this support by donating if you can and sharing the link with your social networks.
Below is some recent research to demonstrate how we are helping to make breech services better and safer for all families:
First OptiBreech results poster! Walker, S., Dasgupta, T., Hunter, S., Reid, S., Shennan, A., Sandall, J., Davies, S., 2022. Preparing for the OptiBreech Trial: a mixed methods implementation and feasibility study. BJOG An Int. J. Obstet. Gynaecol. 129, 70. https://epostersonline.com/rcog2022/node/4909
Spillane E, Walker S, McCourt C, 2022. Optimal time intervals for vaginal breech births: a case-control study. NIHR Open Res. 2, 45.https://doi.org/10.3310/nihropenres.13297.1
Walker S, Dasgupta T, Halliday A, Reitter A, 2021. Development of a core outcome set for effectiveness studies of breech birth at term (Breech-COS): A systematic review on variations in outcome reporting. Eur. J. Obstet. Gynecol. Reprod. Biol. 263, 117–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejogrb.2021.06.021
Happy new year, breech advocates! We’ve got nearly 10 hours of evidence-packed, video-rich, detail-loving breech birth training content waiting for you.
Our fully updated 2022 course is now on-line. To help you reach your new year’s resolution of developing some beautiful breech skills, the course will be available at a discounted price of £50 for the first two weeks of January. No code needed; access is for one year.
Image by Katherine Gilmartin
Along with a new course, our Vimeo library has a NEW PASSWORD. This is available from the “Resources for Teaching and Implementation” section of any course you are enrolled in, along with our amazing Dropbox of guidelines and training resources. Registered users have permission to use the content for non-profit teaching purposes — because learning together is the safest, most effective way to do it.
All of our online courses also come with free access to our Online Webinars. These are one-hour discussions on topics that have arisen during the course of our practice or others’, where we share learning and reflection with each other.
If you have previously completed any of our on-line courses, you are eligible to register for the Refresher course for only £10/year. This is exactly the same as the main course, but for a nominal cost to help us keep our platforms online. You can review the course, or just complete the assessment to obtain a new certificate for your portfolio.
Image by Katherine Gilmartin
Anyone organising or attending one of our face-to-face courses will be given free access to the on-line course for one year. Due to the on-going pandemic and need for social distancing, we rarely have external places to offer as we did pre-2020, but you can still host a study day for yourself and your colleagues.
If your site is participating in the OptiBreech Trial, your free online training package has already been updated.
What if I have attended an in-person course in the past? Access to the Refresher Course is only available to those who have purchased and completed one of our on-line courses, beginning in 2021. All of our previous courses have been advertised with one year’s access to our Vimeo Library. Content is updated regularly, so our recent courses are significantly expanded, based on current research, compared to those of previous years. If you have completed the main course, the system will automatically consider you eligible to take the Refresher. If you use our videos for teaching within your institution, we encourage you to ask your employer to reimburse your training so you can continue to maintain access.
Opportunities
Finally, some opportunities to become more involved in Breech Birth Network. We would really like some help with the following, and if you are willing to make a regular commitment and develop the skills necessary, we can also pay you! Emma and I developed the skills to do all this because that is what was necessary, and we know others can too.
Ideally, we would like to involve people who are supporting breech births professionally in some way, so that the learning that occurs in these roles also spills over into developing your own practice. That’s what makes it worthwhile for us. And obvs, we expect that you would have completed our training to know what you are getting into and that your approach to breech birth aligns with ours.
Online Webinatrix. We do our online webinar series ad hoc at the moment, but we’d like it to happen regularly.
Video Master. We have a large Vimeo library, but in order to make the most of it, it needs to be organised — edited, tagged, consent forms stored securely, etc.
Online education Diva. In addition to developing new content based upon new evidence or learning from practice in our communities, we have a need to develop translated versions of our courses to make them more accessible to a wider audience. We use Articulate 360 and WordPress, and although we don’t expect you to come in with those skills, we need someone who is willing to develop them to get the job done.
Accounting Guru. This doesn’t necessarily need to be a birth professional. We use Xero, and our amazing admin assistant Charlie has been doing this for us for a few years, but now needs to hand over due to other exciting things happening in her life.
If you are interested in any of these roles and prepared to make a commitment to helping our small, not-for-profit enterprise grow, please get in touch using the form below.
Breech Birth Network are pleased to announce the publication of an evaluation of our physiological breech birth training, conducted in eight NHS hospitals across England and Northern Ireland. Click on the image below to read the full evaluation.
Highlights
Multi-disciplinary training, involving NHS midwives and obstetricians
Only training to have demonstrated an increase, rather than a decrease, in vaginal breech births following delivery of the training package, although this was not statistically significant
Use of upright positions at birth increased significantly
Pilot data: no adverse outcomes among births attended by someone who had completed the training, compared to a background rate of 7%
Pilot data: perineal outcomes similar to cephalic births
Congratulations to midwife Stella Mattiolo, who collected and analysed this data as part of her Masters in Research.
El servicio de Obstetricia del Hospital Sant Pau se caracteriza por su amplia trayectoria en la asistencia integral al parto de nalgas mediante una atención multidisciplinar.
El objetivo de esta jornada es dar a conocer la asistencia al parto de nalgas y sus alternativas así como cualificar a los profesionales que lo deseen para atender un parto de nalgas y aprender a resolver posibles complicaciones.
Para ello contaremos con expertas internacionales con amplia experiencia en la asistencia al parto de nalgas.
La inscripción incluye documentación del curso, traducción simultánea de las ponencias en inglés y diploma de asistencia. Inscripción de a la Jornada a partir del enlace:
Plazas limitadas. Se admitirán por orden riguroso de inscripción. Se aceptarán anulaciones hasta el 01/06/2021. Por gastos de anulación, se devolverá el 85% del importe de la inscripción
From 1 May 2021, access to the Physiological Breech Birth video library on Vimeo, hosted by Breech Birth Network, will only be available through our on-line training programme.
Although we’ve always offered a year’s access with training, we’ve never changed the password. But it’s been over a year since we have been able to deliver any in-person study days.
If you have purchased the on-line training, you will have access to the complete training for a year, as well as the Vimeo video library. The password to the library will be posted within the training programme, so you can continue to access the videos you use in training. If you attend an in-person training, you will be given access to the on-line training for one year.
If your organisation uses our videos, someone from your organisation will need to be enrolled onto our on-line course. Institutional rates are available if you would like all of your staff to have access to the course and the video library.
Thank you for making such good use of the training materials we’ve worked hard to create. May the breech babies find you and be safe in your hands.
Providing advanced training to a core breech clinical teaching team is potentially more efficient and effective than training the entire maternity care team using traditional methods. The theory is strong, but rigorous research needs to be done.
Traditional training, looks something like this: Participants take time away from clinical commitments to attend a dedicated training session, ranging in length from a few hours to a whole day or more.
Challenges for this approach in the context of breech birth
1. It’s expensive
While preparing the research proposal for the #termbreech2020 Physiological Breech Trial, I worked closely with NHS Research & Development Finance specialists. Using the Agenda for Change pay scales, we calculated that providing 1 day of physiological breech birth training to 5 obstetricians and 5 senior midwives will cost the service £2,442 just to release them from clinical work. Multiplying this to cover the whole staff will obviously increase the cost exponentially. And then there is the cost of paying the trainers.
This is why most training programmes, like PROMPT, use a ‘train the trainers’ approach. It is a more efficient and effective way to disseminate training throughout an organisation. [PROMPT is a great multi-professional training package, but unfortunately, they excluded outcomes for breech births from their evaluation (Draycott et al 2006). So this training has not yet been evaluated for vaginal breech birth.]
2. The effects of training wear off before most people will have a chance to use it
Our systematic review of the effectiveness of breech training strategies showed that breech training can improve objectively assessed skill and knowledge, but that these effects wear off quickly, sometimes within 6 weeks, sometimes within 72 hours. A bigger concern was that, in some cases, confidence increased but objectively assessed skill did not. Training alone is likely not sufficient to improve breech skills, but for those who have some clinical experience, it may extend current understanding.
If you train a staff of 40 (or more) in a service that has only 1 breech birth per month, most of them will not have a chance to consolidate their learning in clinical practice. And if you do not have a plan for ensuring that someone who has attended enhanced training will attend the vaginal breech births that do occur, the enhanced training will not contribute to improvement in outcomes.
3. Clinical support in practice appears to make the biggest behavioural change
A surprising finding from our systematic review was that attendance at an obstetric emergencies-type training course was inversely associated with attendance at vaginal breech births, unless a system was in placed to provide clinical support in practice. This means that clinicians attended fewer vaginal breech births after taking breech training as part of an obstetric emergencies package. Although no quantitative evaluation was done, the studies that reported increase in breech births attended all had a model for ensuring experienced support in practice.
Conclusion
Implementing a breech clinical teaching team is a way of ‘training everyone.’ The model just differs from traditional ‘training day’ methods, which have not proven effective on their own in sustaining safe vaginal breech services.
Paying a few people who want to support breech births to be on-call occasionally and to cascade training is likely less expensive than providing enhanced training to the entire maternity care team, or even the entire senior team. But we need to implement the model and evaluate it in a systematic way in order to determine cost effectiveness. This is why experienced health economists are central to the #termbreech2020 Physiological Breech Trial and helped develop the design.
According to the evidence, breech clinical teaching team is also likely to result in greater availability of the option of vaginal breech birth for women who want them. This was a central concern of the women who participated in #termbreech2020 Physiological Breech Trial public engagement work.
But! Isn’t experienced senior clinical support what consultant obstetricians do? … Good question. We’ll discuss that next …
Dr Anke Reitter and Dr Shawn Walker of the Breech Birth Network will teach together in Barcelona on 23 April at Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau. Please share with your obstetric and midwifery colleagues. Materials will be translated into Spanish for participants. Click the image below for more information on how to register.
Next month, I will be a Visiting Scholar at the University of British Columbia. This will include a workshop on my research and physiological breech birth practice, delivered alongside Andrew Kotaska, lead author of the Canadian breech guideline, and a highly respected obstetric and midwifery faculty.
Please share this information with any Canadian OBs and Residents who want to extend their skills to facilitate safe vaginal breech births. The course is accredited for MOC 3. Bookings can be made on-line.
