The Labour Ward Handbook | PDF Download

Description:

This succinct manual provides detailed clinical practice guidelines for the care of women in labour, this is designed to be a ready guide for use in the delivery suite by the busy clinician. The third edition has been updated to include new developments in clinical practice and governance and new guidelines. So far as is possible, the differences in care scenarios internationally have been addressed to provide a reliable guide to safe delivery.

Key Features

*Provides detailed clinical practice guidelines for the care of women in labour.
*Offers a ready guide for use in the delivery suite by the busy obstetric clinician and all members of the team.
*Focuses on the clinical relevance of the problem points arising.

Preface

In high pressure situations such as the delivery suite, clinical practice guidelines can be invaluable. Unfortunately, many guidelines are written in the form of a textbook of theory and practice, not in a style that facilitates speedy reference. What busy staff on the shop floor need in the delivery suite is not a tome that describes underlying theories and research findings, but a handbook that succinctly spells out what should be done and when. The Labour Ward Handbook sets out to meet this need. The layout is readerfriendly, with less prose and more bullet points and tick boxes. References have been excluded from the main text and gathered at the end of each section under ‘Further reading’. The tick boxes allow copies of the relevant pages to be inserted into the woman’s hospital records, with the relevant boxes ticked, as a supplementary record of the woman’s care during labour.

There are other principles which underpin this handbook. The first is a focus on the management of risk. Some of the chapters and the appendices specifically address risk issues, and other chapters have warning boxes or contain elements designed to help minimize human error. Secondly, although (for the sake of simplicity) the chapters are mostly named after clinical conditions and processes, the woman is always at the centre of care – it is the individual woman rather than the condition that should be the focus. Thirdly, the book is addressed to both doctors and midwives, emphasizing the team approach. Also, normal and abnormal labour are regarded as a continuum.

Clinical practice constantly changes as new evidence emerges, and every effort has been made to keep this third edition of The Labour Ward Handbook as up to date as possible. I hope that it will facilitate an evidence-based but also holistic approach to care in labour.