TWO local midwives are celebrating after winning a national award.
Christine Harding and Wendy Randall from the Royal Berkshire Hospital and Oxford University Hospitals respectively scooped the honour at the British Journal of Midwifery Awards (BJM) 2019 ceremony for their contribution to midwifery education.
The duo received it for the work they have carried out to improve midwives’ training in monitoring babies’ hearts in the womb.
They had developed an interactive Intermittent Auscultation (IA) tool that enables midwives to detect changes in the womb more accurately.
The tool, alongside a training package, is intended to make IA safer and facilitate better assessments of how babies cope with the labour.
Ms Randall, who has worked for Oxford University Hospitals for five years, and Ms Harding, a midwife in Reading for more than 20 years, were delighted with their win.
In a statement, the pair said: “We are very proud that our work has been recognised as the best contribution to midwifery education and we hope it will reach out to as many people as possible to share our resources with.
“We feel that there has never been such a robust training programme for IA or an assessment and this is vital for ensuring safe maternity care.
“We hope that the BJM award we received will raise the profile of our training and hope that many organisations (NHS and Universities) will see the value of our package.”
Oxford Academic Health Sciences Network and OXSTAR (Oxford Simulation, Teaching and Research) have also contributed to Ms Randall and Ms Harding’s work on the development of the IA tool and the training programme.
The event was held on Wednesday, February 13 in Leeds.
