Future developments
It could be argued that to reliably detect FHR baseline and decelerations, it may be better to perform IA after two or three successive contractions which would take about 10 minutes. The IA frequency can then be safely decreased to every 30 minutes or so during the first stage of labour.25 There is an option of performing IA from before and through the contraction until the beginning of the next contraction (a full cycle). But, then the midwives need to be empowered to ignore the FHR decelerations (if auscultated) which are concordant with contractions recovering by the end the contraction; as these non-hypoxemic decelerations are currently quite rightly ignored with the most guidelines of IA anyway.1-3,6,25