This week's The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health includes an article describing standardised scores for the Parent Report of Children's Abilities, Revised (PARCA-R) questionnaire. The PARCA-R is recommended for routine use in the UK to screen for developmental delay in children born preterm and can be completed by parents in 10 to 15 minutes.
A new website has also been lauched featuring an online version of the questionnaire and a pre-programmed calculator for deriving the standardised scores.
Dr Louise Linsell at NPEU collaborated with colleagues at the University of Leicester and other universities to standardise the scores.
We can now quantify a child’s developmental level relative to the UK population of two year olds, and identify advanced or delayed development. The standardised PARCA-R is freely available for parents to use and has been translated into 14 languages. It provides a reliable, cost-effective alternative to other developmental assessments that can be costly to administer.
Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4 at 10 a.m. on Monday 15th July 2019 features a discussion on the increased maternal mortality rates among black and minority ethnic women in the UK. The discussion cites findings from MBRRACE-UK and includes the birth experiences of women who contacted the programme.
The Priority Setting Partnership in Diabetes and Pregnancy have launched their Initial Survey today. The survey is the first step in finding the unanswered questions about diabetes and pregnancy that, from the perspective of women, their support networks (families, partners, friends) and healthcare professionals, are the most important for research to address.
Women, their friends and families, and healthcare professionals with experience or interest in pregnancy with diabetes are invited to complete the survey. This can be anything about the time before, during or after pregnancy with diabetes of any type e.g. type 1, type 2, MODY, gestational diabetes and others.
By highlighting the important areas for research to funders of research and policy makers, the project will support research which will improve the healthcare and wellbeing of women and families affected by diabetes in pregnancy.
Do you have questions about diabetes and pregnancy? Complete the survey and help change lives.
E-Freeze is a multi-centre randomised controlled trial being conducted in the UK. It compares fresh embryo transfer with frozen thawed embryo transfer for couples undergoing their first, second or third round of fertility treatment.
The main aim of E-Freeze is to understand if having a fresh or thawed embryo transfer makes any difference in the chance of having a healthy baby.
The study protocol for E-Freeze has been published in the BioMedCentral Reproductive Health journal. You can find it here.
We will be holding two MBRRACE-UK launch meetings during 2019. The first meeting, in October, will launch the MBRRACE-UK Perinatal Mortality Surveillance findings: Deaths for Births from January to December 2017. The second meeting, in November, will launch the MBRRACE-UK Saving Lives, Improving Mothers’ Care report.
Please find further details of the two events below. Full details of each event, including how to book and how to submit an abstract are available on the page for the specific event.
Results of the ANODE (prophylactic ANtibiotics for the prevention of infection following Operative DElivery) trial have been published in the Lancet journal. The study found that a single dose of antibiotic after assisted vaginal births can reduce the risk of infection by 56% up to six weeks after delivery, and reduce antibiotic use by 17%.
One in five women experience an infective complication after operative vaginal birth, and according to the senior author of the study, Professor Marian Knight, prophylactic antibiotics can prevent over 7,000 of these infections annually in the UK.
The results of the ANODE trial also have implications for healthcare resources: women who received prophylactic antibiotic were less likely to report visiting a GP, nurse, midwife or hospital outpatient department in relation to concerns about wound healing compared to those who received placebo. According to lead health economist Associate Professor Oliver Rivero-Arias, this resulted in a mean NHS cost saving of £52.60 per woman at six weeks.
You can read more about the findings of the ANODE trial here.
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Manisha is a Senior Epidemiologist and Research Fellow and has established a UK-India collaborative platform for maternal and perinatal health research called MaatHRI and is currently using this platform to conduct large epidemiological studies to improve pregnancy care and outcomes in pregnant women with anaemia.
Her work in India is investigating the risk factors, outcomes and clinical characteristics of heart failure in pregnant women; examining the safety of induction and augmentation of labour in pregnant women with anaemia; examining the difference in coagulation parameters in pregnant women with and without anaemia; and estimating the incidence of selected severe pregnancy complications.
