Pregnant women in Delhi considering a normal delivery have probably heard one or all of these lines before.
“You’re too overweight to have a normal delivery.”
“Why do you want to give birth yourself? A Caesarean will be so much easier.”
And perhaps the most common line of all:
“You’ve already had a Caesarean once.
Recently, one of our obstetric consultants met a mother with a 3-year old baby in her clinic. She was a playful and happy little baby but had a few characteristic features that set her apart. Payal had all the class signs of a baby with Downs Syndrome – a small chin, slanted eyes, a flat nasal bridge,
Deliveries by caesarean section have been steadily rising in Delhi and across India over the last decade. And the reasons behind their rise are not always medically sound.
Sometimes, women elect to have a caesarean because they’re afraid of labour pains; but with the proper support in the labour room, women can successfully have a normal delivery and a positive birth experience.
There was a time when Indian cooking was a great nutrition source for a pregnancy diet. We knew that if we ate our greens and our lauki, increased our whole-grain intake through rotis and dalia and kept a healthy intake of dairy products going, we wouldn’t have much to worry about.
On the evening of July 9, 2016, I was nervous about the “sharing and learning session” I was to facilitate at Sitaram Bhartia the next day. This was going to be the first-of-its-kind session at the hospital where five teams were going to share their improvement stories with each other. Neither were they going to showcase their work to management nor to an audience outside the hospital.
“We discussed this internally but don’t feel we have the bandwidth to travel to Mexico” I wrote to small nonprofit in India, whose target population was very different – middle-class women in Delhi subject to over-intervention in maternity care rather than the most marginalized populations dying from access to care.
My doubts were quickly put aside in the Welcome Event.
When I was asked to register for the small non-profit hospital in Delhi, I wondered whether the conference would be applicable for our setting because many of the topics seemed related to public health.
But Abhishek Bhartia, our director, thought differently, and soon we were in London to attend what turned out to be a bonanza of sharing,
“A leader must be able to define an ideal state and get people enthused about moving towards it” said Dr Prab Prabhakar, a consultant paediatric neurologist at the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), as we sat down together in my office. I had met Dr Prabhakar a few months ago in London and was pleased that he was taking a day out of his vacation in India to visit us.
Every year we celebrate International Nurses Day on Florence Nightingale’s birthday. In our hospital it’s a time when nurses dress up in their best, renew their pledge to serve, collect awards, and put on a cultural program. For the third year in a row I was asked to say a few words. Last year I had discussed how our newly introduced Training Within Industry (TWI) program had helped reduce nursing complaints,
**This post originally appeared on the BMJ Quality Blog.
Change is always hard and most of the times we hate to change. Often, attempts to change or improve in an organization are met with resistance, making failure and frustration the common outcomes of change initiatives.
In the summer of 2012,