Obesity in Pregnancy – Management Guidelines to be published, London, 19th March 2010.

Centre for Maternal and Child Enquiries (CMACE) & the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists (RCOG) will publish professional guidance on the management of women who are obese in pregnancy.

This is very good news for women and professionals alike, when it comes to managing obesity and overweight in pregnancy. After a lot of effort by many individuals and professionals bodies, guidelines for the care of women at high risk of complications during pregnancy and labour will now be available.

Until it is now, there has been little co-ordinated management advice to professionals that considered the obese woman holistically.

The guidelines are a result of recommendations made after the last Confidential Enquiry into Maternal and Child Health: Saving Mothers’ Lives – Lewis, G. (ed) 2007 that found that more than 50% of women who died from Direct or Indirect causes were either obese or overweight.

This guidelines will be a start, and complement other initiatives that seek to address the problem of obesity in society.

Care of the pregnant obese or overweight woman in the hospital will be streamlined and co-ordinated between different professionals.

Must our hope that the high morbidity and mortality associated with obesity will start to fall as a result of the guidelines. Confidential Enquiries are credited for creating an audit process that has led to falling maternal death rates in the UK. The enquiry process and resulting practice recommendations have been replicated across the world.

Although these guidelines will provide a template for the care of the pregnant woman, it is not certain there will be much in there for the woman after pregnancy. This would make the service we have set up for the weight loss after pregnancy timely indeed.

I will be reporting back from the launch of the CMACE/RCOG joint guideline: Management of women with obesity in pregnancy soon after the conference.