You are here

  • Home
  • Online First
  • The ‘Ready for Child’ structured antenatal training programme increases likelihood of mother's arriving at the maternity ward in active labour and decreases use of epidural analgesia

Article Text

Article menu

other Versions

Download PDFPDF
Midwifery
Randomised controlled trial
The ‘Ready for Child’ structured antenatal training programme increases likelihood of mother's arriving at the maternity ward in active labour and decreases use of epidural analgesia
  1. Caroline SE Homer
  1. Centre for Midwifery, Child and Family Health, University of Technology Sydney, Broadway, New South Wales, Australia
  1. Correspondence to Professor Caroline SE Homer
    Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Health, Centre for Midwifery, Child and Family Health, University of Technology Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway NSW 2007 Australia; caroline.homer{at}uts.edu.au

https://doi.org/10.1136/ebn1127

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Commentary on:

    1. Maimburg RD,
    2. Vaeth M,
    3. Dürr J,
    4. et al
    . Randomised trial of structured antenatal training sessions to improve the birth process. BJOG 2010;117:921–8.
    OpenUrlCrossRefPubMed

    Antenatal education programmes have been implemented in many settings around the world. There is, however, uncertainty about their effectiveness. Many studies have failed to show a benefit for women in terms of birth outcomes. A systematic review in The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews included nine trials (2,284 women). The findings were inconclusive with inconsistent results and small sample sizes. The authors of the Cochrane Review stated that the “effects of general antenatal education for childbirth or parenthood, or both, remain largely unknown.”1 Few large well-conducted randomised controlled trials have been undertaken which make the study by Maimburg and colleagues particularly exciting.

    The intervention and comparison group

    This study, conducted in a Danish university hospital, tested whether a structured antenatal training programme – ‘The Ready for Child’ programme – would impact on the labour and birth process of women having their first baby. The study was a randomised controlled trial comparing the new programme with standard care.

    The ‘Ready for Child’ programme comprised three modules, each lasting 3 h, delivered to women between 30 and 35 weeks of gestation. The content of the birth module included lectures and discussion on labour onset, the birth process, the father's …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Competing interests None.