Validation of the City Birth Trauma Scale to assess post-traumatic stress symptoms in maternity staff.

Summary: Every year, hundreds of thousands of mothers and babies face severe complications or even die during childbirth. The doctors, nurses, and midwives who care for them witness these heartbreaking events and can suffer from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) as a result. Until now, there wasn't a good way to measure this specific type of trauma in healthcare workers. Researchers adapted a tool called the City Birth Trauma Scale to test 396 maternity staff members. Shockingly, they found that nearly a third of these workers met the criteria for PTSD. The study proves this new tool is highly effective at identifying trauma in maternity staff, which is a huge step toward getting these essential workers the mental health support they need.