Thanks everybody for your comments/support/views on routine fetal movement counting
There is no doubt about the importance of fetal movement and its' reduction being an indication for fetal well-being .  But is it appropriate to ask every woman to count it routinely is the question and what do we achieve by "asking every woman to count and tick boxes"??  The current evidence does not support the routine use of the kick boxes and it is matter of perhaps investigating the most effective way of doing this?! 
Is it better to focus on the high risk women  asking them to do the charts and discuss the importance of fetal movement with all other mothers but leave it to the mothers to be the judge of that rather than relying on our own (currently proven unreliable charts for routine use).  
The other issue (as with any other screening programs) is having a relatively robust approach to be able to act and prevent fetal death (in this case)!.  Again current evidence does not show that we do this?!!  I know some of you say "Oh we've done that/or seen this happening"! But unfortunately the published evidence does not show that! 
So perhaps it's  time to pull our sleeves up and look at our data (the one's who have seen a  fetal death prevention with routine/or even targeted screening) and do an audit/research and share the results with us.

Thanks
Hora

Dr Hora Soltani
Lead Research Midwife
Derby City General Hospital
Tel: 01332 340131, ext. 5134

>>> Yana Richens <[log in to unmask]> 23/01/2003 21:13:45 >>>
Do we not teach a lot of things to student midwives that are not "evidence"
based surely we need to think about the type of evidence?

I accept that there is not much evaluation around counting foetal movements,
but I think we have all seen cases where women have reported a reduction in
foetal movements and swift action has saved a baby

yana



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