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
Yesterday was International Day of the Midwife. I saw but didn’t participate in the social media celebrations. Not because I wasn’t feeling it, but because my clinical academic midwife life was full to the brim. This included:
This is the dress I made for Professor Jim Thornton’s retirement party, which I couldn’t attend due to another breech birth!
Supporting a planned OptiBreech vaginal breech birth through the night and until the birth occurred in the morning;
Receiving and responding to the news that both my funder and my employer have received complaints that the OptiBreech Project is ‘promoting vaginal breech birth;’
Allowing my little dog to take me for a walk to support my physical and mental health;
Taking a massive nap; and
Spending a wild evening in on my sofa, knitting a jumper for my son Waldo the Stonemason and listening to a Miss Marple audio book.
If you feel exhausted just reading that list, you’re as human as me!
A team is not a group of people that work together. A team is a group of people that trust each other.
– Simon Sinek, shared by Céline, an attendee at my VIDM presentation
OptiBreech
This feasibility study is undoubtedly the most challenging and most rewarding thing I have ever done in my life. Being a research leader means being a change leader, and change is never easy. The OptiBreech Project is proposing a paradigm change in the way we support vaginal breech birth. This means a change from promoting caesarean section (CS) to supporting each individual women’s choice of mode of birth, in line with NICE Guidance. And it means a change from using unreliable ‘selection criteria,’ which are also inconsistent with the concept of individual choice, to relying on specialist expertise to respond to unfolding and infinitely unique circumstances.
When I sit down to eat some dark chocolate and peanut butter because I’ve worked my butt off today …
Being a breech specialist is not easy. In addition to a lot of time spent on-call, it’s not like working in a low-risk midwifery setting, where you can anticipate 90% of women will have the normal birth that they want. Many women are heart-broken when they find out their baby is breech. We can support them to plan an elective CS, and some women are happy about this, but many are very disappointed, even when they feel this is the best option for them and their baby. For those who want to plan a vaginal birth, but only if the baby is head-down, baby turning (ECV, external cephalic version) is only successful up to 50% of the time. We are still there for women when it does not work.
For those who want to plan a vaginal breech birth, the barriers sometimes seem impossible. It’s not uncommon for women to make an informed decision to plan a physiological breech birth (PBB) and return to clinic in tears because of the way someone has spoken to them, be that another health care professional, a friend or family member, or an unkind stranger on social media with opinions about the wisdom of their choice. The criticism, judgement and stigma can feel very heavy at such a vulnerable time. Our interviews with women on the study indicate they have felt supported to change their minds and plan an elective CS in these circumstances. Of course we can and do facilitate women changing their minds, but we can’t take away the hurt women feel when they wished for more support to make a different choice.
Birthing people who stick with their choice to birth vaginally despite such ubiquitous doubt frequently want reassurance that everything will be okay. Of course, we can never guarantee a perfect outcome. We can only guarantee that we are doing our best to increase the chances we will get professionals with enhanced training and experience to their birth. We believe this will improve outcomes for these births (that is the premise of the research), but we will not know until many OptiBreech births have occurred. And we all have to be prepared for a higher need for intrapartum CS to achieve a safe outcome for breech babies, even when trying for a vaginal birth.
Those of us supporting women who choose physiological breech births face similar criticism and judgement on a regular basis. Sometimes the lack of respect and unkindness feels overwhelming, and it is tempting to succumb to despair. I find it helps to remember that behaviour like this comes from a place of fear, a belief that doing things differently could have disastrous outcomes. Nobody wants this, and nobody wants to be responsible for it. In difficult times, I lean into the support I feel from many wonderful midwifery and obstetric colleagues, who help bring me back to a place of compassionate understanding. Only by opening to understanding each other can we move towards trust and safety — physical, emotional and spiritual safety in each others’ hands.
Listening to my ‘Joy and Love’ playlist helps too. Here’s a mini playlist of my favourite Resistance Revival Chorus songs, for anyone who needs them today.
This week, the NIHR (UK based) announced a PhD Fellowship opportunity. A Fellowship is designed to support a researcher to gain experience and training in doing research, and to support the research itself. It’s a great opportunity. Advertisement pasted below.
If you are reading this after any of these calls have closed, the same organisations may have a more recent call.
NIHR-Wellbeing of Women Doctoral Fellowships (Round 6)
Provide the opportunity to undertake exciting and impactful research that will underpin a researcher’s development as an independent future leader. The Doctoral Fellowship funds researchers to undertake a PhD
Wellbeing of Women is delighted to have partnered with the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) to jointly fund one Charity Partnership Doctoral Fellowship.
All NIHR Fellowships provide the opportunity to undertake exciting and impactful research that will underpin a researcher’s development as an independent future leader. The Doctoral Fellowship funds researchers to undertake a PhD.
NIHR Charity Partnership Fellowships offer researchers the opportunity to be part of an active and supportive community, drawing on the enormous benefits and opportunities of cross-sector working.
HEE/NIHR ICA Clinical Doctoral Research Fellowship
The Clinical Doctoral Research Fellowship (CDRF) funds health and social care professionals to undertake a PhD and professional development in parallel, alongside continued professional practice.
The scheme is part of the HEE/NIHR Integrated Clinical Academic (ICA) Programme.
CDRFs are available to health and social care professionals (excluding doctors or dentists) who are registered with an ICA eligible regulatory body.
If you are considering training to be a researcher and/or clinical academic who does breech research, we would love to hear from you. There are many challenges in breech research. For example, variations in when the breech is diagnosed make recruitment challenging. Sometimes dramatic variations exist between centres in external cephalic version success rates, vaginal breech birth experience and whether or not breech presentation has a dedicated care pathway. This can make recruiting sites difficult, and it is difficult to reach an adequate sample size within single-centre studies. But we have experience in navigating some of these challenges and are keen to collaborate with others.
For example, in the OptiBreech Project, we are building a database designed to support a large, multi-site observational cohort study with multiple embedded trials along the breech care pathway. Some of the questions women or potential researchers have told us would be useful to answer include:
Does moxibustion work in a UK context, and what does it cost? This could be tested as a trial within the cohort.
Rebozo sifting / positional exercises / homeopathy / hypnosis — do they influence the rate at which babies turn head-down, or the success rate of external cephalic version? This could be tested as a trial within the cohort.
Does provision of an ECV service by a Breech Specialist Midwife change the outcomes of the service? And what does it cost compared to an obstetric service? This could be tested as a trial within the cohort.
Should we offer cervical sweeps to women with breech-presenting babies? Are they helpful? Safe? From when should we offer them? This could be tested as a trial within the cohort.
Does offering induction of labour for women with a breech-presenting baby who desire a vaginal breech birth affect modes of birth and/or outcomes? This could be tested as a trial within the cohort
If you’d like to consider applying for this or another source of funding for breech research, you are welcome to be in touch to discuss!
