What Is Fetal Monitoring and How Does It Prevent Birth Injuries? | Legal FAQ

Heidi Wickstrom:
One significant way to prevent birth injuries is proper monitoring of baby when baby is actually in the womb and when mom is going through the labor and then eventual delivery process. So you may be wondering, how can one monitor a baby when they're still inside mom's belly? So in that circumstance, we have what's called fetal monitoring. And this results in basically using a device that's put on mom's belly, and it tracks baby's heart rate, how baby's doing basically in the womb. And baby's heart rate lets us know how well baby is oxygenated. And baby who's getting sufficient oxygen means that baby is healthy and they should be neurologically intact. So not having any sort of brain damage or any brain problems. What's also being tracked, along with fetal monitoring, which means keeping track of the baby's heart rate, are mom's contractions. So you don't want mom to be contracting too much because that puts stress on the baby and that can cause the baby's heart rate to skyrocket or a baby to have problems. Obviously, monitoring a baby through fetal monitoring strips or the fetal monitoring system is can be difficult, trying to keep an eye on how baby's doing.

But there are some signs that baby might be in distress. And at that point, if the staff and the team taking care of baby and mom don't do something about it, it could potentially be medical negligence. The category 3 strip is the most ominous and probably clearest sign that something's wrong with baby. Category 3 means that we're not seeing spikes in the baby's heart rate. The baby's heart rate is generally quite low. Baby might not be moving around as much anymore. That's a sign right there that you're seeing this on the strips. This is the way that baby is talking to you through the fetal monitoring strips. And at that point, it would be negligent to not move to get baby out of mom's belly at that point. At that point, you're worried about baby and potentially mom, too. Some other issues where there may be something that you can see on the fetal monitoring strips that could lead to medical negligence would be if the staff is perhaps not watching the strip carefully enough to see that that strip has moved from maybe being reassuring and not worrisome to an area where they're starting to be a little, some problems that could be corrective, but maybe corrective measures aren't being taken, like giving mom oxygen, checking on mom, making sure baby's okay.

You can do something called a fetal scalp stimulation where you actually touch the baby's scalp and make sure they respond to that. Failing to monitor as the strip is getting a little bit more concerning also leads to an avenue where we have to check to see if potentially the failure to monitor may be negligent. If you or someone you love have questions about a potential birth injury matter, give us a call at the office. We're the attorneys at Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard, and we're here to take your calls and help out if we can.