Physicians' beliefs and behaviour during a randomized controlled trial of episiotomy: consequences for women in their care.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Oxytocin, published as a randomized controlled trial.

To evaluate whether physicians' beliefs concerning episiotomy are related to their use of procedures and to differential outcomes in childbirth.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 703 women taking part.

PubMed indexes the participants as adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

Post-hoc cohort analysis of physicians and patients involved in a randomized controlled trial of episiotomy.

Subjects attended by residents or nurses were excluded.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized study.

Because people in this Oxytocin study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Two tertiary care hospitals and one community hospital in Montreal.

Intact perineum v. perineal trauma, length of labour, procedures used (instrumental delivery, oxytocin augmentation of labour, cesarean section and episiotomy), position for birth, rate of and reasons for not assigning women to a study arm, postpartum perineal pain and satisfaction with the birth experience, physicians: beliefs concerning episiotomy.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Attitude of Health Personnel, Cohort Studies, Episiotomy, Oxytocin, Parity, Patient Satisfaction and Perineum.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Oxytocin in 703 women.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

Results are reported in around 7 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 1995 (CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association journal = journal de l'Association medicale canadienne), a journal based in Canada.

More context: the related Oxytocin library page, all human trials.