Women in labour should be given more time to give birth and have fewer medical interventions, while participating more in decision-making, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday. Among 26 new recommendations, it rejected a traditional benchmark in labour wards worldwide for the dilation of a woman\u2019s cervix at the rate of 1 centimetre per hour, saying it was \u201cunrealistic\u201d and often led to excessive caesarean sections.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat has been happening over the last two decades is that we are having more and more interventions being applied unnecessarily to women,\u201d said Dr Olufemi Oladapo, a medical officer in WHO\u2019s department of reproductive health and research.<\/p>\n
\u201cThings like caesarean sections, and using a drug called oxytocin to speed up labour is becoming very rampant in several areas of the world,\u201d he told a briefing.He was referring to the synthesised form of a natural hormone routinely injected intravenously to women to cause contractions, expediting birth to avoid complications.<\/p>\n
In the 1950s, American obstetrician Emanuel Friedman studied the progression of labour and laid down a guideline that a woman\u2019s cervix should dilate at the rate of 1 cm per hour in the initial stage. But research in the past 15 years, including a WHO study of 10,000 women in Nigeria and Uganda, has shown the rate can be slower without endangering the health of a woman or child, Oladapo said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not a good benchmark, it\u2019s not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. We feel that everybody is unique, and some women can go slower than that and still have a normal vaginal birth.\u201d A better threshold is 5 cm of dilation during the first 12 hours for a new mother and 10 hours in subsequent labours, WHO said. A woman\u2019s vital signs and baby\u2019s heartbeat should be monitored closely throughout.<\/p>\n
Caesarian rates of more than 10-15% do not appear to lead to any significant drop in mortality rates of mother or child, said WHO\u2019s Metin G\u00fclmezoglu. Among middle-income economies, Latin America, Turkey, China and Iran have high caesarean rates, but so do some hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa, \u201cand often not for the right reasons\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n
Women should be allowed to choose their delivery position, including squatting or sitting, and be offered pain relief, Oladapo said. \u201cWe want a situation where women have an informed choice, and they are involved in decision-making,\u201d he said. Episiotomy, a cut made to the woman\u2019s outer genital area to widen the birth canal, is not recommended routinely. \u201cIf anything it actually does more harm than good,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Women in labour should be given more time to give birth and have fewer medical interventions, while participating more in decision-making, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday. Among 26 new recommendations, it rejected a traditional benchmark in labour wards worldwide for the dilation of a woman\u2019s cervix at the rate of 1 centimetre […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22052,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22051"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22053,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22051\/revisions\/22053"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}