Future developments
It could be argued that to reliably detect FHR baseline and
decelerations, it may be better to perform IA after two or three
successive contractions which would take about 10 minutes. The IA
frequency can then be safely decreased to every 30 minutes or so during
the first stage of labour.25 There is an option of
performing IA from before and through the contraction until the
beginning of the next contraction (a full cycle). But, then the midwives
need to be empowered to ignore the FHR decelerations (if auscultated)
which are concordant with contractions recovering by the end the
contraction; as these non-hypoxemic decelerations are currently quite
rightly ignored with the most guidelines of IA
anyway.1-3,6,25