OUH and Royal Berkshire leaders in the country for midwifery education
14/02/2019
This article is more than five years old.
Consultant midwives Wendy Randall and Christine Harding respectively from Oxford University Hospitals and the Royal Berkshire Hospital have won a national award for their contribution to midwifery education.
At the British Journal of Midwifery (BJM) Awards 2019 ceremony, held on 13 February in Leeds, Ms Randall and Ms Harding received recognition for the work they have carried out to improve midwives' training in monitoring babies' hearts in the womb.
The BJM Practice Awards are a prestigious and important part of the midwifery calendar and celebrate outstanding achievements in midwifery practice. Every year, the awards recognise hard-working individuals and teams in the midwifery profession.
The duo developed an interactive Intermittent Auscultation (IA) tool that will enable midwives to detect changes in the womb more accurately.
The tool, alongside a training package, is intended to make IA safer and enable midwives to better assess how babies cope with the labour.
Ms Randall, who has worked for Oxford University Hospitals for five years, and Ms Harding said:
"We are very proud that our work has been recognised as the best contribution to midwifery education and we hope it will reach out to as many people as possible to share our resources with.
"We feel that there has never been such a robust training programme for IA or an assessment and this is vital for ensuring safe maternity care.
"We hope that the BJM award we received will raise the profile of our training and hope that many organisations (NHS and Universities) will see the value of our package."
Oxford Academic Health Sciences Network (Oxford AHSN) and Oxford Simulation, Teaching and Research (OXSTAR) have also contributed to Ms Randall and Ms Hasting's work on the development of the IA tool and the training programme.
Ms Randall and Ms Harding added: "We would like to thank Alan Inglis, Senior Simulation Technician at OXSTAR for helping us prepare the sound for the assessment as without his skills and patience this would not have been possible to create.
"Likewise we are grateful to Oxford AHSN for all their support to our project."
At yesterday's ceremony, Oxford University Hospitals was also represented by Anita Hedditch, senior midwife and lead of the Breech Team at the John Radcliffe, who was shortlisted for the Midwife of the Year award.
Pictured: Christine and Wendy at the ceremony on 13 February 2019.