Happy new year!
Looking back on 2023, we at Breech Birth Network would like to celebrate another year of collaborative work to make vaginal breech birth safer — for those who choose this mode of birth, and those who have no choice.
Within the past year, our instructors have delivered our fully evaluated training day to fourteen healthcare services in the UK, covering Scotland, Wales and England. This has provided hands-on instruction to over 700 clinicians. We have also delivered training abroad in several different countries. Our online course has reached over 1500 subscriptions globally.
We also delivered the course for the first time as a joint event with the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. This first event was over-subscribed, drawing 105 participants from across the UK and abroad.
OptiBreech Leads have also used our resources to deliver internal training to staff at sites participating in that research.
We also want to celebrate midwife Rosemary Umolu, who has assisted us by co-ordinating trainers for our study days over the past year. She did all this while completing her Masters in midwifery exploring what human factors affect the management of breech delivery. Congratulations Rosemary!
Rosemary’s project was inspired by her experience as a student midwife with a breech delivery that took just under 20 minutes to resolve. The event ended with Rosemary performing a maneuverer called a shoulder press to free the baby’s head. Although both mother and baby were clinically well at time of discharge, the incident inspired Rosemary to conduct a Scoping Review exploring what human factors affect our decision-making skills during critical events. What was once seen as another mode of delivery is now viewed by many clinicians as a medical emergency that needs to be managed. The scoping review found human factors such as communication, fear, confidence and expertise all play a significant role in the management of vaginal breech births. However, simulation training and dedicated breech teams may help improve confidence in midwives and obstetricians and their ability to manage physiological breech births successfully. In doing so, we encourage women to birth more autonomously and confidently, trusting in their body and being fully informed about their choices.
As a community interest company, all of our profits are channeled back into activities that support our aims. We have supported several new instructors to gain experience delivering the training by paying their expenses and a small daily rate for their time to teach alongside our most experienced instructors. We have paid for student midwife research assistants working on the OptiBreech project, enabling that work to progress and those midwives to develop capacity for a clinical academic career. We have supported breech researchers to attend conferences to present their work. And we have paid open access fees so that breech research can reach all of those who need it the most.
But we’ve also been in transition. We’re an incredibly small team, and a few changes in administrative support has been a challenge. At the end of the year, we finally appointed a permanent operations manager, Rebecca Rivers, who will be settling into the role in the coming months. Welcome Rebecca!
We’ve also been aware for some time that the online training platform we are using is clunky and not meeting learners’ needs for ease of access, community and discussion. Sorry about this. If anyone knows an educational technologist with a passion for disseminating breech research and practice, please direct them our way!
But finally, we have recently transitioned to a new online learning platform, which we are very excited about! This platform will operate through a browser and an app, making access easy. And it will provide much more opportunity for discussion and community-building, to enable our breech providers to learn from each other. To ease this transition, we’ve automatically enrolled anyone who has ever purchased our online course in the new space for one year.
Looking forward to 2024, we can already see it is going to be a busy one! We have six study days booked across the UK for the first three months of the year and expect this to continue. Demand is growing as clinicians learn how our systematic approach can help them to keep breech births safe, especially for novice attendants who may only be exposed through training before needing to manage an unexpected situation.
The Vaginal Breech Birth study day at the RCOG will run again this year on 9 May 2024. Trainees are able to get half of the course fees reimbursed through their training budgets.
Our new online platform also makes it easier to share our online training with universities who train midwives and doctors. We trialed this in 2023, and in 2024 we will be launching a package just for students, which they can access via their universities. Watch this space!
Wishing you all a happy and healthy new year!
Shawn Walker
