Programmed Labour: A Comparative Study

Programmed labour is meant to provide pain relief and to hasten the labour process for better obstetric andneonatal outcome. It includes 3 components: active management of labour, use of obstetric analgesia anduse of partography. It was a prospective study for the patients admitted in ASCOMS hospital undergoingprogrammed labour for a period of 2 years from 2017 to 2019. A total of 50 patients underwent programmedlabour in this period. and an equal number of controls were enrolled. The duration of stages of labour,amount of pain relief and maternal and neonatal outcome was noted. In the present study, the duration offirst stage was 3.36 hrs as compared to 5.25 hours in control group which was significantly lower. Theduration of second stage of labour was also significantly lower in study group (27.2 mins vs 56.88 mins).Among the pain relief scores, 8 patients had no pain relief, 9 had mild pain relief, 14 had moderate painrelief while 19 patients had excellent pain relief. The incidence of normal vaginal delivery, LSCS andforceps/ventouse delivery were respectively 88%, 6% and 6% and neonatal outcome was also good.Programmed labour is a safe and effective technique to provide pain free labour to patients and shortenthe duration of labour without inadvertent side effects and excellent maternal and neonatal outcome.