Health Matters: Prize for top midwife team

A BRADFORD consultant midwife and her team have won one of the UK's top midwifery prizes at the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) Annual Awards.

Consultant midwife Alison Brown, and Deborah Hughes, a community midwife, both of Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, have scooped the Bounty Award for Promoting Normal Birth, sponsored by Bounty Parenting Club. The award was given for the "Bradford Homebirth Workshops," which delivered workshops about home birth to boost the region's low home birth rate of 0.5 per cent; nationally the homebirth rate is three per cent.

As a result of the project, by September 2010, their homebirth rate had risen to two per cent. A collaborative effort, the workshops involved midwives, and parents who chose homebirth and were held in community settings and promoted normal and natural childbirth.

Dangers of being blind drunk

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A LEADING Yorkshire eye surgeon warns that 'vodka eyeballing', a dangerous drinking game recently featured on a BBC documentary, can lead to permanent eye damage and even complete loss of sight. The game involves pouring neat vodka onto the eyeball from the bottle in a bid to get drunk very quickly and has become popular amongst students.Shafiq Rehman, consultant ophthalmologist at Calderdale & Huddersfield NHS Trust and Yorkshire Eye Hospital, confirms that whilst vodka cannot enter the eye in great enough amounts to affect the speed of alcohol absorption,it can indeed strip away the protective membrane covering the eye causing serious pain with catastrophic consequences for the cornea, the eye's surface and vision itself.The process of vodka eyeballing has featured on YouTube and there are a range of social networking sights where groups support the phenomenon.In the BBC 3 documentary, actress Emily Atack met with students who advocated 'vodka eyeballing' as a way of getting drunk.

Inspiration for fund-raisers

The Yorkshire Haven in Leeds is running a series of free 'hands on' workshops to help give people the inspiration and key skills needed to raise crucial funds for the charity's Pink Power Challenge.

The Haven in Yorkshire provides free support and holistic therapies to help people with breast cancer to cope with the physical and emotional side effects of the disease and its treatment. Visit www.thehaven.org.uk or call 0113 284 7800 for more information.