OptiBreech Care Trial
Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, Redhill; PI: Lead Clinical Midwife Kate Stringer; Obstetric Lead: Miss Avni Batish, Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist. Those who wish to self-refer can contact the team on Sash.breechclinic@nhs.net
Kingston Hospital, Kingston-upon-Thames (SW London); PI: Emma Spillane; those who wish to self-refer should contact the PI directly, Consultant Midwife E.Spillane@nhs.net
The Royal Oldham Hospital; PIs: Breech Specialist Midwife Amy Meadowcroft (Amy.Meadowcroft@nca.nhs.uk) & Midwife Zainab Sarwar Zainab.Sarwar@nca.nhs.uk
Birmingham Women’s; PI: Louisa Davidson; those who wish to self-refer should contact the PI, Consultant Midwife louisa.davidson@nhs.net or breech specialist midwife lucy.williamson11@nhs.net
Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust (SE London); PI: Consultant Midwife Danielle Nixon (lg.breechbirth@nhs.net)
Homerton University Hospital (NE London); PI: Birth Options Midwife Erin Bradley-Scott (erin.bradley-scott@nhs.net); complete the antenatal self-referral form
Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust; PI: Ms Helen Le Grys; those who wish to self-refer should contact the PI directly, Consultant Obstetrician helen.legrys@nhs.net
The Royal London Hospital, London; PI: Consultant Midwife Priscilla Dike (priscilla.dike@nhs.net)
(PI = the lead researcher on this project at the Trust, known as the ‘Principal Investigator’ in research lingo)
OptiBreech 
I am following this project with high interest. I am an Australian midwife, who has cared for a number women birthing their breech babies, but have met a lot of resistance and lack of support from both Obstetricians and midwives.
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Thank you Meredith. Unfortunately, this is what many midwives and obstetricians who support vaginal breech births have reported. We hope that we can find a solution that will help people support vaginal breech births more safely and feel comfortable offering this as an option. We welcome your input.
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Hi Shawn, the OptiBreech Project will be so valuable. Will all the participating sites be in the UK?
Is there any opportunity for birth units outside of the UK to be part of the research.
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Hi Meredith.
At the moment, this is a UK-based study, as it is funded by the National Institute for Health Research. We’ll have our hands full with this for a while, but once we develop the database and ensure that we are collecting useful and thorough data, we may be able to consider how to enable sites outside the UK to participate. Often, this means a research team from the non-UK country would need to obtain funding and approval to conduct the study in that setting. Multi-national research is very complicated! But of course we are open to speaking with any research team who would like to explore doing this and very happy to share our protocol and lessons learnt as collaborators.
Warm Regards,
Shawn
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Thanks so much for sharing these details! I’m currently 34 weeks pregnant with a breech baby and hope to refer and participate at one of the sites (Kingston) if baby is still breech in a couple of weeks, if I find that there aren’t skilled attendants willing and available to support physiological birth in my local NHS trust area. Thank you so much for the work that you are all doing to build the evidence base for safe clinical practice, and improving teaching and learning in this area where knowledge and skills are being so rapidly lost. It is also amazing to see the the videos of breech birth to see clearly that female bodies are indeed capable of birthing breech babies fantastically. This is a real encouragement for me personally, and builds confidence in my ability to birth my baby.
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Thank you Gabriella & good luck for your upcoming birth. Glad you are willing to be a part of this research 😊
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I am a midwife at St Helier Hospital in Carshalton. I would really like to participate in this study as I am particularly interested in breech and supporting true evidenced based consent from women, supporting them with VBB. My matron is also very experienced in breech and we have been discussing creating a team that specialise in supporting midwives to facilitate VBB. Are we able to get involved?
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Hi Chloe — Yes, this is possible. I will e-mail you. ☺️ Shawn
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Hello, have you finished recruiting participating sites? I’d be interested in exploring this for my unit.
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Hi Emma. Thank you for your interest. If you e-mail me (Shawn.Walker@kcl.ac.I’m), I can get you a site information pack. We’ve just admitted some more sites so won’t be doing this again immediately. But we are hoping it will be feasible to do a substantive trial, which will require many more sites. So please do be in touch so we can register your interest & you can begin talking with your colleagues about how you might get involved.
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Hi, my waters broke at 19 weeks so baby is in the breach position I’m now currently 29 weeks and the drs are really trying to push me to have a c section but I am still waiting to go naturally and I am struggling to get them to listen to me especially when I was advised to have a termination at 19 weeks because they believed the baby wouldn’t survive this long so I feel like my wishes are not being listed to and the Dr I had seen today even admitted himself it’s offered because they no longer do enough natural births with breach babies so are loosing the skills to be able to look after us during delivery I feel like because if that I may have to have a c section which has taken its toll on my mental health but feel like it’s unfair that I have no choice due to the lack of experience with breach so thank you for the training you are doing because hopefully in the future you can reach Scotland so others are not left without a choice
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