Women’s birth experience according to the type of pushing used during the second stage of labour: a pragmatic randomised trial—The EOLE study

The experience of birth may be influenced by the type of pushing used during the second stage of labour — directed open-glottis or closed-glottis pushing. The principal objective was to assess the impact of the type of pushing on women’s experience four weeks postpartum. This is a secondary analysis of a multicentre randomised trial conducted between July 2015 and June 2017, which aimed to compare open-glottis (OG) with closed-glottis (CG) pushing ( n = 250 women). Participants have had a specific training, had a planned vaginal birth with a live singleton pregnancy in cephalic presentation ≥ 37 weeks with no uterine scar or fetal heart rate anomaly. The women’s experiences of birth were evaluated four weeks postpartum with the Questionnaire for Assessing the Childbirth Experience (QACE). The principal endpoint was the mean score (from 0 to 10) of the women’s global birth experience. This secondary analysis considered the 199 women who responded to this questionnaire (OG: 98 vs. CG: 101). We did not find any statistically significant difference between the groups for the global birth experience score (OG: 8.0 ± 2.1 vs. CG: 8.2 ± 1.8, p = 0.56) nor in the onset of a bad experience, score ≤ 7 (OG: 33.3% vs. CG: 27.1%, p = 0.35), nor for any of the four dimensions of the questionnaire. The type of directed pushing used did not affect women’s experience of birth with epidural analgesia.