A new report from the Rotunda Hospital has revealed that several pregnant women who contracted Covid ended up suffering losses in their pregnancies.
According to the report, some women developed an infection in their placenta as a result of testing positive for Covid. This infection, tragically, led to their babies not surviving in the womb.
These findings concluded that the staff at the Rotunda Hospital managed to intervene in a few Covid cases, and their timely actions saved the lives of some babies. “There were also a number of near misses, where the placenta was also deemed to have significant placentitis, but in which timely intervention resulted in good foetal outcomes,” the report said.
In order to try and combat the dangers of Covid amongst pregnant women, Rotunda Hospital implemented many changes, including the consideration of labour induction for those women in the third trimester who had tested positive for Covid.
Additionally, the report noted that the hospital received “a recent spike in cases of moderate to severe hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy (HIE)” towards the end of 2020. HIE can be incredibly dangerous, as it causes the baby to suffer a lack of blood flow or oxygen around the time of their birth.
As a result, the Rotunda Hospital created a taskforce to look at the issues surrounding HIE cases, and have since incorporated all of the recommendations the taskforce put forward.
In terms of the top three reasons why pregnant women were admitted to the Rotunda’s high-dependency service, postpartum haemorrhage, hypertensive disorders and sepsis were all factors. These conditions have been the most common factors for the past five years.
In positive news, the hospital has shared their statistics for their births in the past year, and there has been a rise. In 2021, the Rotunda had a 10% increase in the number of births they conducted, with 8,968 babies being born - including six triplets! The number of those born by caesarean section was increased too, to 37%.
