We are thrilled that so many practitioners around the world are using our online resources to share the skills and learning with others in their organisations. We cannot keep up with requests for the new password, which is a wonderful problem to have. 😊
The password for our Physiological Breech Birth video library on Vimeo changes at the beginning of each year. This is for two reasons:
First, to offer some measure of protection from circulation without permission. We are incredibly grateful to the women, families and healthcare professionals who have allowed us to use their videos.
Second, we need to be able to financially support these platforms. So the password continues to be available for anyone who has purchased and has access to our online training platform or the refresher course. To access the refresher course, you first need to complete the main course. Read more.
To access the video library:
Log in and click on the course where you are enrolled.Open the course and click on “Resources for teaching and implementation.”The password is available, along with a link to the library and our Dropbox of resources.
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.
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.
The team at Sygehus Sønderjylland, the University Hospital of Southern Denmark, has created a wonderful new series of training videos for upright breech birth. We are thrilled to be able to share them with you!
The creation of the videos was led by obstetrician Kamilla Gerhard-Nielsen, who also led the implementation of the upright breech concept in the hospital and its introduction in Denmark.
They also host a FaceBook page. Image: Obstetricians Katrin Loeser and Kamilla Gerhard-Nielsen
There is a small revolution happening around vaginal breech birth, and this is due in large part to the miracles of modern technology, especially videos. Watching many breech births via video enables midwives and obstetricians to develop pattern recognition — what is normal, what is not, when it is time to intervene — without having to attend many breech births. And it enables this to happen more quickly than it would normally happen, over decades of practice. Birth videos also enable us to study the features of breech births in a systematic way in research.
Birth videos will never entirely replace clinical practice, but they can accelerate the learning process. We are incredibly grateful to the women who are enabling this to happen. This blog is addressed to health care providers who may want to ask for permission to film births to support skill development throughout their clinical team.
Permission and the Law
The content of medical care is confidential to the patient, not the health care provider. This means that women have a right to film their births, which are part of their private lives, if they want to. It is, however, respectful to ask for permission.
The GMC provides guidance on the recording of patients, and the principles of informed consent apply. Your employing Trust will also have guidance and forms that can be used to obtain consent, which are usually available from the Medical Illustration Department or similar. You should speak with your managers and team as well. In the Breech Birth Network, we use our own consent form, which you are welcome to use. It allows people to choose from different levels of consent, e.g. just for teaching in person, on-line teaching with restricted access, unrestricted on-line access. It is best practice to take the final consent after filming so that she can identify anything she would like edited out, e.g. if her name is audible or her face is visible., or change her mind.
A copy of any videos should be given to the woman and placed in the woman’s hospital notes.
You will need a good quality video camera. Most phones contain a decent video camera these days, and most of our videos were taken on phones. But something like a GoPro is designed to adjust with movement. GoPros also take in a wider angle than standard phones.
GoPro Chesty
You will need something to hold the camera and ideally, be able to move to get a good angle — so not a static mount. In some videos, it seems as though people are staying ‘out of the way’ in order to enable the camera to get a good shot. This is not a good idea; you want the primary attendant fully focused on the birth and disregarding the camera. In the Hospital of Southern Denmark, filming is the job of the Junior Doctor, who is learning about breech births but not yet managing them.
POV necklace mount
The other alternative is a POV (point-of-view) mount. GoPro make a special chest mount, but … let’s just say they are not designed for women. It’s called a ‘Chesty,’ and that’s exactly how I felt while wearing one. I prefer something called a necklace mount, which keeps the camera closer to where your eyes naturally are and is much more comfortable to wear (IMHO).
We have a number of online and upcoming learning opportunities available for you.
The Practising Midwife, June 2020
“No more hands off the breech” is published in this month’s The Practising Midwife. In this article, I argue that we need to reconsider the way we use Mary Cronk’s famous phrase, “Hands off the breech!,” along with some other commonly held beliefs that may not be helpful.
I’d love to hear what you think about this and how it relates to your experience.
Consultant Midwife Emma Spillane and I are also speaking at the Northern Maternity and Midwifery Online Festival on Tuesday 23 June. I will be talking about improving the safety of breech birth through research, and Emma will be speaking about implementing a breech birth service.
Finally, our Vimeo channel features a couple new videos created to help student midwives learn about research, through the lens of improving breech safety. I’ve posted them below. The settings enable you to share and embed if you would like.
The first video explains one of the studies published as part of this Trio of Breech Articles, an open-access special issue from the journal Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care.
This year we honour midwives who continue to do the best job in the world under the most difficult of circumstances. Please enjoy this virtual International Day of the Midwife 2020 celebration from King’s College London student midwives, staff, alumni and collaborators. I’m so proud to be a part of this team!
And as always, we at Breech Birth Network honour the highly skilled midwives around the world who are working to make vaginal breech births safer and more accessible, for the women who choose them and for those who do not have a choice.
As part of the celebrations, I’ve made this video to explain the recent research that Dr Anke Reitter, Alex Halliday and I have done about what ‘normal for breech’ looks like. The video can be shared. Thank you to the women and professionals who have shared their intimate and vulnerable moments to make this possible.
The research is published open-access (FREE!) as part of a trio of breech articles by the journal Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care.
“Practical insight into upright breech birth from birth videos: a structured analysis” is now available on-line! (Reitter, Halliday and Walker, 2020, Birth – https://doi.org/10.1111/birt.12480) This paper represents a few years of hard work by Anke Reitter, me and our Research Assistant, Alexandra Halliday. It contains insights into birth timings and the mechanisms as observed in upright breech birth videos. The Physiological Breech Birth Algorithm is also included.
Download Algorithm
We look forward to much debate and discussion! Please share with anyone concerned about safe vaginal breech birth.
Love,
Shawn
Traduit par: Isabelle Brabant et Caroline Daelmans
Missed our Facebook Live event with Fernandez Hospitals? Watch the recording here:
PMET student Arunarao Pusala receives her training certificate in Karimnagar
This month I am in Hyderabad, India, visiting Dr Evita Fernandez and UK Consultant Midwives Indie Kaur and Kate Stringer. Today at 5pm IST (that’s 11.30 GMT), we will be having a Facebook Live discussion on Breech Birth in India. This will be followed by hands-on workshops on the 12th and 19th in Hyderabad.
with Senior Midwives Theresa and Jyoti
The Fernandez Hospitals are at the forefront of compassionate maternity care on a large scale in India. The Stork Home facility has been beautifully designed and rivals some of the best midwifery units in the UK. But Dr Evita and her team of doctors and midwives are very ambitious. They want to revive vaginal breech skills so that women can confidently choose this option. How will this work in Hyderabad? Join us for a discussion.
Midwives and doulas support women together in the beautiful Stork Home facility in Hyderabad
From Arunarao: “My special thanks to dr Evita ,lndie mam Kate mam and Shawn mam for the opportunity to participate in BREECH BIRTH WORKSHOP at karimnagar.i am so panic about breech presentation and breech birth before I come to professional midwifery training, know iam very excited to assist the spontaneous and assisted breech birth,because now I came to know breech also has its own mechanism and always always we have to respect those mechanism and iam aware of the manoeuvres to apply whenever it’s needed.thank you all of you mam iam so blessed to have a teaching faculty like you.” Thank you Arunarao — you really got it!
Jessica’s baby remained persistently breech at term, and she was unable to find a provider in South Carolina to facilitate a vaginal breech birth. When she attempted to decline a CS and negotiate a vaginal birth, she was informed that if she came into the hospital in labour, she would be given general anaesthesia and her CS would be ‘a lot rougher.’ (Folks, the ACOG published something just for you: Committee Opinion No. 664: Refusal of Medically Recommended Treatment During Pregnancy.)
This was Jessica’s first baby, in a frank breech position (extended legs), with no additional complexities. Her sister, Family Practice Doctor Jacqueline Sequoia MD, heard about Dr David Hayes and Harvest Moon Women’s Health because they were hosting my physiological breech birth training. Jacqueline includes obstetrics as part of her practice and booked to attend the workshop with some colleagues. Jessica and her husband Brian met with Dr Hayes to consider their options, and once Jessica made her decision, found a rental apartment in Asheville on Craigslist.
Let’s contemplate that for a moment. In order to have support for a physiological birth, rather than the threat of a coerced CS, women are having to relocate to another state and rent temporary accommodation, because the baby is presenting breech.
When Dr Hayes and I arrived at Jessica and Brian’s apartment, Jessica’s labour appeared to be progressing well. As people entered her space, Jessica gradually moved into the tiny bathroom at the back of the apartment, reminding me of Tricia Anderson’s metaphor of cats in labour. I turned off the light. This labour had a journey, as all labours have. Throughout her journey, Jessica was surrounded by people who love her. At the end of it, Jessica beautifully and instinctively birthed her little girl, Leliana, who weighed 7lbs 8oz.
This video contains graphic images of a vaginal breech birth.
Being attuned to the general lack of training in physiological breech birth among health professionals, and the consequences for women and babies, Jessica and Brian were keen to share this video of Leliana’s birth to help others learn. If you would like to read more about the minimally invasive manoeuvres used at the end of this birth, you can read our blog on Shoulder Press and Gluteal Lift.
Thank you, Jessica, Brian, Leliana, Dr Sequoia and Dr Hayes for sharing this video. The link to this blog post can be shared, but the video cannot be downloaded or reproduced without permission.
The team at Sygehus Sønderjylland, the University Hospital of Southern Denmark, has created a wonderful 
