Free eLearning Course for Midwives

Whilst most babies born with CMV will not have CMV disease, CMV can cause injury to the baby’s developing brain. In Australia, more than 400 babies every year are born with a life-long disability caused by CMV, including deafness, epilepsy, intellectual impairment, cerebral palsy and, in rare, cases death. This makes CMV the most common infectious cause of disabilities in newborn babies.

However, Australian research has highlighted that: Less than 20% of pregnant women know about CMV (Lazarro, 2019), and only 10% of maternity health professionals routinely discuss CMV with pregnant women (Shand, 2018) – something that needs to change.

As a global leader in the prevention and treatment of cerebral palsy, Cerebral Palsy Alliance has joined forces with CMV Australia and the Australian College of Midwives to launch a free e-learning course for midwives.

This free course has been designed for midwives and midwifery students and may also be relevant to other maternity health care professionals.

This course will support you to learn about:

• cytomegalovirus (CMV) and how it is spread
• congenital CMV and how it can affect babies
• current recommendations for serological testing of maternal CMV
• recommended prevention strategies for reducing the risk of CMV infection and
• transmission during pregnancy
• the role of midwives in counselling pregnant women about CMV and
• current CMV education resources

Developed with midwives, obstetricians, infectious diseases specialists, researchers and families who have been impacted by CMV, this interactive course aims to update midwives on how CMV can adversely affect babies and highlight preventive strategies for reducing the risk of infection during pregnancy.

This course has been recognised by the ACM for 2 CPD hours, which is equivalent to the course duration.

All users are provided with 12 months access from the date of their enrolment.