LO
Midwife — tasks, one by one
The unit of analysis is the task, not the job title. Each one below carries its direction, whether the judgement rests on evidence or on platform inference, the reasoning, and what it does not establish.
Every task on this page#
Antenatal care and risk assessment
Being augmented✓ Evidence-backedChecking the mother and baby through pregnancy, spotting risks such as high blood pressure or reduced movements, and referring when needed.
Software helps with some checks but has not taken them over: NHS England recommends computerised analysis of the fetal heart trace before labour over visual reading, while in a trial of 2,441 higher-risk pregnant women, home blood-pressure monitoring with telemonitoring did not detect high blood pressure sooner than clinic checks.
A national recommendation and one trial in England; they do not measure how antenatal visits or midwives' time have changed.
Monitoring labour
Still human-led✓ Evidence-backedListening to or tracing the baby's heart rate during labour, reading the trace and deciding when to escalate.
Computer reading of fetal heart traces in labour was tested at scale and did not help: in the INFANT trial of 47,062 women, decision support did not improve outcomes for mothers or babies; England's guideline body said one-to-one care should not be replaced by automated interpretation and made no recommendation for the software; and NHS England now requires more human review, a second person at least hourly when a trace is used.
One generation of software in the UK; newer systems are cleared elsewhere as aids, and no trial of them has yet shown better outcomes.
Attending births and emergencies
Still human-led≈ Platform inferenceSupporting the woman through birth, delivering the baby, handling bleeding, resuscitating newborns and calling for help.
No record found shows machines attending births or handling obstetric emergencies; the work is hands-on, and national care bundles add training and competency checks for the people who do it.
The absence of a record; it does not rule out devices that change how emergencies are handled.
Postnatal and newborn care
Being augmented≈ Platform inferenceChecking mothers and babies after birth, supporting feeding, spotting problems and keeping records.
Inferred: maternity records are moving to electronic systems, which change how notes are kept, but no record found measures how postnatal visits or feeding support are changing.
Inferred without a record on this page; it does not show any change in hands-on postnatal care.