As we recognise midwives on the International Day of the Midwife on 5 May 2019, I remember a wonderful day spent with Mary Cronk MBE asking her questions about her eminent career. This is particularly poignant as Mary sadly passed away in February this year, aged 86.

Having trained as a nurse at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, Mary moved to London to train as a midwife at Queen Charlotte’s in London. After practising as an NHS community midwife for decades, where she challenged obstetricians and supported colleagues with wisdom and compassion to ensure women received the best care, she became an independent midwife in 1991.

Very happy to share KGHypnobirthing with the gurus of healthy living and eating Ella and Matt. There is so much you can do when you focus on a healthy approach to life - in diet, exercise and of course birth. It's a pleasure to support them as they focus on the normality of birth.

in our first session we covered the evidence behind KGHypnobirthing, as well as the breathing and techniques to achieve the best possible birth. On the second day we go deeper into how to apply this knowledge when you actually give birth, how to work with your medical caregivers, and why this is the very best start in life for your baby. 

It’s not long until this year’s MaMa conference and we are busy preparing to go to Scotland to meet NHS and independent birth professionals. The conference is being held in Glasgow on 3-4 May and is the largest independent annual midwifery and maternity healthcare conference in the UK.  We are looking forward to discussing various aspects of pregnancy, birth and hypnobirthing with the people who visit our stand, giving away copies of The Hypnobirthing Book and encouraging them to enter the MaMa raffle to receive a free place on the KGHypnobirthing teacher training course.

As I look back at how hypnobirthing has grown over the past decade or so, it’s rather like the three trimesters in pregnancy – waiting for the big event, the culmination of a vast amount of work, growing a baby or for me, KGHypnobirthing. Of course, it doesn’t happen all at once, but in stages.

Informative & Interactive Hypnobirthing Content

In the build up to World Hypnobirthing Day we are going to share some fabulous and interactive content for all mums-to-be to support them on their journey. Our first article is all about the initial stages, The First Trimester of Pregnancy.  

The second “World Hypnobirthing Day” takes place on Saturday 21st March 2020.

Celebrating the immense impact that Hypnobirthing has had on so many women, their birth partners and of course their babies! And how this has changed the lives of birth professionals as they care for these parents-to-be.

History and Growth of Hypnobirthing

From its infancy with research from Dr. Grantly Dick Reid, work from Ina May and Michelle Leclaire O'Neill, hypnobirthing has come on in leaps and bounds.  The graph below shows the growth in interest in the worldwide searches of hypnobirthing (from Google trends).  The middle spike shows when Prince George was born in 2014 (with the world's media speculating if Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, had used hypnobirthing techniques) and the far right spike recently in 2020 is when Kate actually confirmed in a podcast that she had used hypnobirthing for all three of her royal births. On top of this, the rise of high profile celebrities sharing their own hypnobirthing stories, have lead to the steady rise in people in people talking about it and knowing what it actually is! 

Your report on induction shared inaccurate statistics and is unnecessary scaremongering.

I was very interested to hear that you were going to discuss induction of labour on your show. This is an area that has such a huge impact on women and their birth outcomes and something we look at in detail on a KGHypnobirthing course: looking at the facts so women can make informed decisions.

However it was with a sinking heart that I listened to Sarah Jarvis share outdated and inaccurate statistics for the stillbirth rate.

Induction of Labour for Medical Reasons

Dr Jarvis ran through a number of medical reasons why induction should be performed for medical reasons. This can be a very valuable part of the care for mums-to-be who need that support, and we are very lucky to have the skilled medical professionals providing this care.

Induction of Labour for Post Due Dates

This is the area I wish to contest your report.

Attending the recent Royal College of Midwives (RCM) conference was a good opportunity for us to highlight the KGH teacher training courses and raise the profile of KGHypnobirthing in hospitals.  It is vital that midwives have up-to-date knowledge about all areas of their practice and the programme this year had an emphasis on challenges and how to overcome them – whether in leadership, quality assurance, addressing inequalities or supporting those most in need and the importance of multi-disciplinary teamwork in all aspects of maternal care.

An evening with Lord Robert Winston

Last week I spent an enjoyable evening listening to Lord Robert Winston speak at Marlborough College.  It was interesting to hear about his role in setting up the IVF service at Hammersmith Hospital in the 1980s and his work on fertility around the world, as well as his more recent appearances in the media.

Ahead of the lecture, I decided to take another look at the current research and found some insightful articles about the role of hypnosis in improving outcomes for IVF.  We have saved them in our Hypnobirthing library for reference which can be found here.

Google trends is a fascinating place to view changes in interest for different search terms over a period of time.  For our area of interest; 'hypnobirthing' it shows a healthy growth shown in the graphs below.  Click on the link or the image to see the most up to date statistics.

These growth charts are a result of all the good work done by the different hypnobirthing groups.  Word of mouth plays an important part in this as well as the many prominent PR stories we have seen recently.  View some of these stories here.

The Mama Conference is always an inspiring event and KGHypnobirthing is delighted to support it. This year I had the privilege of being invited to speak on ‘Midwives Tuning in to Hypnobirthing with Mothers.’

It is a very heart warming to see the snowball effect that hypnobirthing is having with so many midwives now having first hand experience of a hypnobirthing mum and seeing how transforming it can be for women during childbirth.  I discussed this alongside the common misconceptions about hypnobirthing.

One is that it is a method of pain relief in labour and the other is that it is a load of techniques that you learn to use in labour. Neither of this is true.