If you’re reading this then you’ve hopefully seen the PHE ‘screening resource pack for student midwives'.
We send it out every year to all universities in England and ask midwifery tutors to give a set to all new starter students.
The latest packs landed in December and should now be with your tutors.
A few years ago we carried out some informal research with students to see what information was most useful to you, and from the requests we get every year, I think we’ve got it about right.
The packs cover the 6 NHS antenatal and newborn screening programmes. You can download an electronic version from GOV.UK.
What’s in the packs?
Screening timeline
This a graphical representation of the optimum times for screening in the antenatal and newborn period. It’s also available as a great animated version with voice over.
We update the timeline regularly and you’ll see that the latest version shows we no longer screen antenatally for rubella susceptibility. The other change we made was to add the optimum time for babies to receive hepatitis B immunisation. But I’m not sure we made this completely clear, as a few people have said it could read as if all babies get this.
So we’ve now improved the wording to make clear that this immunisation is for babies born to women who are hepatitis B positive. To avoid any ambiguity we have changed that now on our online version and any further printed versions we produce.
List of screening resources
We provide links to, and brief descriptions of, all of the screening resources freely available to you as a student midwife. This includes our suite of popular e-learning modules.
If you have not had a look at these modules yet I’d urge you to as they offer an interactive way to learn about the 6 screening pathways. You can also test yourself and get evidence of learning. It only takes a couple of minutes to register for free if you haven’t already.
All the resources can support your studies, assist towards meeting screening related competencies and help you facilitate informed choices in screening with the women in your care.
Genetic inheritance diagram
This is a diagrammatic explanation of recessive inheritance.
Set of resource cards
These are pocket sized credit card style cards which contain ‘point of care’ information. They include facts, figures, explanations and diagrams that midwives find helpful when discussing screening with women and their families.
Future plans
In keeping with our commitment to the Government’s digital by default strategy, we are looking at reducing the amount of hard copy resources we produce across screening and are working with stakeholders to offer resources in alternative formats. We want to achieve this without compromising accessibility and quality – and hopefully improving it! We will start a project this spring looking at developing the information on the resource cards and in your student midwife packs into an online format which will be easier to keep up to date. Watch this space for developments.
If you have any comments regarding this or would like to take part then please do get in touch with me via the screening helpdesk.
Finally, we do recommend that all student midwives sign up for the blog to ensure you don’t miss anything – so why not do this now if you haven’t already?
PHE Screening blogs
PHE Screening BLOGs provide up to date news from all NHS screening programmes. You can register to receive updates direct to your inbox, so there’s no need to keep checking for new blogs.