Nurses Undertake Direct and Indirect Fetal Monitoring at a Community Hospital

Abstract

In order to fully utilize their new fetal monitoring equipment and to monitor all labor patients, a small, community hospital elected to allocate to OB nurses responsibility for direct and indirect monitoring, including application of internal devices (per physicians’orders) and interpretation of tracings. The staff originated a training program and internal accreditation, which they called certification. Both are mandatory for nurses who are monitoring labor patients. They also established procedures and instructions for monitoring.