How to Use a Fetal Heart Monitor

Video Transcript

BEA ROWELL: Hi, my name is Bea. I'm a midwife here at Labor of Love Birth Center in Lutz, and we specialize in caring for women in pregnancy who are low risk and interested in out-of-hospital birth setting. I'm here today to show you how to listen in to a baby's heartbeat using the handheld fetal heart monitor. I got my friend Kathie here and her little baby inside who is going to help us show how this is done. The first thing that you need to do is just check around your abdomen, pushing in gently to feel which position the baby is in. You're feeling for the firmer side which is going to be the baby's back. This baby is hanging out on the right-hand side today, and I know that because I can feel over here. Everything is a bit squishier. I can feel some limbs. Along this side, I'm just feeling the long line part of the back. So you're going to take your monitor. You need to use lots of the gel that comes with the monitor. This makes sure you got a good connection through the skin and the tissue to pick the heartbeat up. And you just switch it on and aim for where you think the baby's heart rate is going to be found. And there I had a perfect hit. You listen in to the baby for a full minute, counting the heartbeats, and that will give you whatever its beat per minute is. If it's easier to do it just for six minutes, then you can times that by 10. And this baby sounds perfectly healthy. Sometimes it can be quite difficult to find the heart rate at first, even for professionals like me who are doing it day in and day out, we have to search. I don't want you to be discouraged in any way if you can't immediately pick up your baby's heartbeat. Just have a look around the tummy and try different areas. If you have any concerns at all about the baby's heartbeat, if you can't find it or you're worried about how fast it's beating, then call your health professional immediately. Thank you and happy listening.