When is it classed as established labour?

[FlirtyThirty]

And what point do they actually say you're in labour?
And I say this having already had a child!

4 cm dilated and regular strong contractions lasting up to one minute.

Thanks! I am amazed people know how long their various stages of labour were...not sure I ever knew except they felt bloody eternal

Have requested my maternity notes though...will I be able to tell from them?
No idea what they write down in labour...except midwife did appear to write lots! (...her shopping list perhaps?)

When I tell them I am. Refusing all internals.

My discharge notes say how long the midwives reckoned my 1st, 2nd & 3rd stages of labour were.

Although I think my duration of 1st stage was probably a bit longer than the 23 minutes they've written down, given that I was examined and told I was at 3cm 3 hours before that 23 minutes started

I think the durations of the 2nd & 3rd stages given in my discharge notes are correct, given midwives were there all the time for those.

It's 3 sodding cm in my trust. Nothing is more dispiriting than being told that even though your cx are over a minute long and 3 minutes apart you are still only 1 cm and they're going to send you home.

With DD1 they had some rule about how far apart the contractions needed to be, as well as being regular. Based on which I was not in labour with DD1 until the syntocinon and had no labour at all with DD2 - fairly sure she's out though .

4cm i believe..

Where I work it used to be 3cm and regular contractions but our birth rate has gone up and labour ward was full all the time so now it's 4cm.

Viva - its been 4cm where ever I have worked/trained, since at least 2004.

I think it's 4cm and 4 mins apart in our trust. I was 2cm and having 2 minute long contractions every five minutes for two days before they declared me in labour. They kept me in as I was due to be induced and I had three lots of pethidine on the ward before they let me at the gas and air in delivery suite on the third day.

That was fun.

at StarlightMcKenzie brilliant and good for you! Wish I could have done, once I was in labour that was the most painful part.

I was told to get to the hospital when my contractions were a couple of minutes apart and I couldn't talk through them. Ice to jump in the car as soon as I put use phone down

4cms and regular contractions at my place too. There was some 'research' done at some point, but always acknowledged that the latent phase is an undistinguished amount of time, and no one person can ever say exactly when established labour begins. Most people who say they were in labour for 7 million days (Ok, so I'm exaggerating... but we've all met someone while pregnant who was in labour for 3 weeks exaggerating again ) have usually had a long latent phase, and although may be contracting regularly and painfully they weren't in labour.

Soozy - I know you mean well, but god I hate it when people say that.

With DD1 I was contracting painfully for at least 24 hours (taking off 24 before that which were also painful, but less so) before they broke my waters and pronounced I was in labour. It's patronising when people say that isn't labour. It is. It may be the latent phase, but for some people that is the hardest and most painful bit.

With DD2 I had what would have been clinically 'not labour' for about 8 hours - where I was mooing like a cow, could barely tell you where I was (my own living room) and was in a lot of pain. The bit they would call 'labour' - well under an hour and not painful in the slightest.

I suppose what I'm saying is that I find it really wrong that there is this arbitrary definition of what labour 'is' - with parts labelled 'not counting'. Everyone is different. Even for health professionals I think a focus on having to have 'established labour' can be risky - as evidenced by DD2 arriving before even the paramedic could get there, as well as the DD1 of a friend of mine. We hadn't ticked the right boxes...

What do you propose instead? As women can be in the latent phase for hours, days, and it can stop, start, stop again, etc etc.

There isn't the beds/resources/staffing to cope with this.

I'm not suggesting that people are in hospital or have a midwife with them for the whole latent stage. All I'm saying is:

• perhaps when people talk about labour, they could remember that people have different experiences. I so often hear people so 'ooh, it might be quite painful, but it's not labour' about the latent phase. You just have to try and ignore it as long as possible'. Often accompanied in real life with a face. I didn't feel any pain on pushing or crowning. It is about as sensitive (and as accurate) as if I walked round saying to people 'well, it's a bit of effort, but it doesn't hurt '.

• that focusing solely on times (particularly times alone, as in when talking to women about whether to come in/have the midwife out) is not very accurate and perhaps the focus on timing encourages HCPs not to always listen to the whole picture and the other signals that a woman's body is giving.