Prenatal Care Online Course(s) & Continuing Education
Access the latest clinical skills and research for Prenatal Care for PREGNANCY, LABOUR & CHILDBIRTH professional training. These Prenatal Care online courses provide practice-changing skills and valuable perspectives from leading global experts. This Prenatal Care education has been accredited for a variety of CEUs / CERPs and can be accessed on-demand, at your own pace.
Hypermobility Spectrum Disorders (HSD) and Pregnancy: Assessment and Clinical Management
Monika Patel, Doctor of Physical Therapy and Strength and Conditioning Specialist has a passion for empowering women to prepare mentally and physically for a well-balanced parenthood. She is currently undergoing the American Physical Therapy Association's Certificate in Obsetrics. She has applied her knowledge toward preventative medicine and established Train4Birth, an affordable online education and beneficial movement course with a built-in accountability feature. She is also the mother of a truck-loving toddler and couldn’t be happier than digging with him in the backyard.
Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) and Hypermobile Spectrum Disorder (HSD) are estimated to affect 6 million (4.6%) pregnancies globally per year. As such, cases of hypermobility in maternity services should no longer be considered rare, only rarely diagnosed. Learn more about the potential impact of hypermobility on pregnancy, how to screen for it and clinical management. Useful hypermobility screening tools and decision-making matrices for birth workers, relative to a patient’s degree of hypermobility, will be outlined.
New Educational Tools to Support Childbearing With Hypermobility Spectrum Disorders
Dr Sally Pezaro is an Academic midwife, and an editorial board member of the British Journal of Midwifery and the International Journal of Childbirth. She is also a member of the Mary Seacole Awards steering group funded by Health Education England, a panelist on the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s fitness to practise Investigating Committee and ‘The Academic Midwife’ on Facebook. Sally has experience working as a midwife clinically in the United Kingdom, the Gambia and Ethiopia. Reflecting on her own experiences, Sally has developed a passion for supporting the psychological wellbeing of health care professionals. Throughout her PhD work, Sally secured the case for developing an online intervention, designed to primarily support midwives in work-related psychological distress. The overriding vision for Sally’s ongoing research is to secure a psychologically safe professional journey for midwives and excellence in maternity care. Her latest work focuses upon improving maternity care for those childbearing with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS), transgender communities, substance use and domestic violence in particular.
Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS) and Hypermobility Spectrum Disorders (HSD) are multisystemic connective tissue disorders and present far more common than previously thought. Recent international findings reveal that poor experiences for those childbearing can result in a disengagement from services, trauma, stress, anxiety and an avoidance of future pregnancies. Alternatively, supportive care and listening can make a big difference to the child bearer. Maternity staff observed in this research were sometimes perceived to be panicked when providing care in this context. Ultimately, childbearing with hEDS/HSD is challenging, as connective tissue is affected throughout the body. Drawing from the findings of their recent international research, a team of expert co-creators employed the ‘Define, design, refine’ method originating from the Co-Creating Welfare Project to develop tools to support education in relation to childbearing with hEDS/HSD. This was done via a series of online co-creation webinars. The final tools comprised an infomercial, an i-learn module to be hosted by the Royal College of Midwives and a practical toolkit with images for universal use. Co-creators were generally positive about their experiences in engaging in this particular online co-creative process, which enabled them to participate in a national project more easily and effectively overall.
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The Midwife's Role in Core and Pelvic Floor Health During the Perinatal Period
Bernadette is a midwife with a Master in Public Health (MPH), core and pelvic floor specialist, published author and previous pant wetter. She has worked in midwifery across Australia from remote Aboriginal Communities to big city hospitals to publicly funded homebirth. She spent a year volunteering as a midwifery educator in the Solomon Islands and teaches midwifery emergency courses in rural and remote areas around Australia. She was awarded the Sidney Sax award for best overall performance in her MPH. She is also the Founder and Creator of Core and Floor Restore – online education and exercise programs, workshops, and consultations. Her passion is to enable people to use their bodies and minds to their greatest ability in all aspects of life. A big part of her work is centered around emotional and physical birth trauma and postpartum recovery. She offers free online antenatal classes and co-host's "The Great Birth Rebellion" an evidence-informed podcast. Bernadette’s life mission to bring the rate of birth trauma down to zero whilst simultaneously improving postpartum care. She has epically birthed two babes at home and recovered from incontinence and prolapse. When she isn’t working or studying you can find her out bush, camping and hiking or splashing in the bath at home with her boys.
Up to 75% of women will experience a prolapse in their lifetime. 1 in 3 will experience urine incontinence and 1 in 10 faecal incontinence. Around 60% of women experience diastasis recti. Add in pelvic girdle pain, a hypertonic pelvic floor, perineal and vulva trauma, vaginismus, vulva varicosities, anal fissures and haemorrhoids and most women, at some point, will describe their body as feeling broken.
Midwives play a crucial role in assisting women in the prevention and treatment of these conditions. International guidelines and clinical standards advise that pregnant and postpartum people should be doing pelvic floor muscle training (PFMT). This however, is not just as simple as doing Kegels while waiting at traffic lights. In order to provide best care, midwives need a deeper understanding of the physiology of the core and pelvic floor in pregnancy, birth and postpartum.
This presentation will enable a deeper understanding of the physiology of the core and pelvic floor during pregnancy, birth and postpartum. You will learn practical techniques to assist women in protecting their core and pelvic floor during these stages, including how best to support physiological birth and what we can do when interventions occur. We will also cover techniques and realities for postpartum healing and evidence-based advice to managing existing conditions.
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