Neonatal examination: are midwives clinically effective?

The objective of the pilot study was to test the appropriateness of an audit tool developed to determine the clinical effectiveness of midwives carrying out neonatal examination of the newborn. The audit was undertaken by reviewing retrospective data, collected from midwives' personal clinical records of neonates and the case records of the babies they had examined. The data was gathered over a period of 18 months, and included the records of 482 term babies. The setting was a district general hospital in the east of England. The participants were all midwives who had successfully completed the neurobehavioural examination of the newborn course, and practising at a local district general hospital. The findings of the study indicate that the audit tool was sufficiently robust to test the clinical effectiveness of midwives' detection of specific congenital abnormalities. Clinical effectiveness rates were reassuringly high. The study also began to highlight the positive impact on the improvement of the service available to women. A further study has been started to compare the clinical effectiveness rates between professional groups.