Here’s a summary of what Emily Hamilton, MDCM will be covering during tomorrow’s free perinatal nursing training webinar designed to help clinicians improve their ability to understand FHR variation and decelerations.
- What regulates the fetal heart rate
- Fetal heart rate decelerations
- Variable decelerations
- Late decelerations
- How they affect clinical interpretation of tracings
Perinatal Training Summary:
The clinical goal of electronic fetal monitoring is to identify fetuses with increased risk of hypoxic injury so that intervention can be executed to avoid adverse outcomes without also causing excessive number of interventions. Understanding the mechanisms of fetal heart rate control is important because it can help us to infer the physiological state of the baby and gauge whether intervention is truly necessary.
Unlike in adult cardiology, where ECG changes are used to diagnose myocardial infarction, labor & delivery clinicians depend upon the heart rate to infer the condition of another organ, namely the fetal brain. Although the fetal heart rate is related to fetal brain state, is is also affected by a number of other factors.
During tomorrow’s training webinar, Dr. Hamilton will provide an overview of recent perinatal research on these factors.
