Obstetrics & Maternal Care Clinical Guidelines
Obstetrics and maternal care guidelines index: ACOG bulletins and clinical practice guidelines, SMFM, AIM safety bundles, WHO, and AWHONN, with sources.
Obstetrics & Maternal Care
The obstetrics and maternal care hub: governing ACOG bulletins and clinical practice guidelines, SMFM, AIM safety bundles, WHO, and AWHONN, each with source.
Obstetrics is the discipline of care for pregnancy, labor, birth, and the postpartum period, and maternal care extends it across the systems, staffing, and safety programs that a pregnant or postpartum patient encounters in hospital. Its governing problems are the hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, obstetric hemorrhage, gestational and pregestational diabetes, venous thromboembolism, maternal sepsis, and the management of labor itself, together with the levels-of-care and nurse staffing frameworks that determine where and by whom those problems are managed. Maternal-fetal medicine is its subspecialty for high-risk pregnancy.
This section is new. It currently indexes the governing professional-society guidelines for obstetrics and maternal care, with publisher, current edition, scope, and a link to the source for each. Multi-part syntheses in the site’s usual format, with DOI-linked citations and sequential part pages, are being added and will be linked from this page as they publish.
Governing guidelines
| Guideline | Publisher | Edition | Scope | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gestational Hypertension and Preeclampsia, Practice Bulletin No. 222 | ACOG | June 2020; a focused Clinical Practice Update on biomarker prediction of preeclampsia with severe features is listed by ACOG | Diagnosis and management of gestational hypertension and preeclampsia | ACOG |
| Clinical Guidance for the Integration of the Findings of the Chronic Hypertension and Pregnancy (CHAP) Study, Practice Advisory | ACOG | April 2022 | Treatment threshold for mild chronic hypertension in pregnancy following the CHAP trial | ACOG |
| Postpartum Hemorrhage, Practice Bulletin No. 183 | ACOG | October 2017; focused Clinical Practice Update on nonsurgical hemorrhage-control devices, October 2025 | Risk factors, evaluation, prevention, and management of postpartum hemorrhage, and standardized bundles of care | ACOG |
| Gestational Diabetes Mellitus, Practice Bulletin No. 190 | ACOG | February 2018; a focused Clinical Practice Update on screening for gestational and pregestational diabetes is listed by ACOG | Screening, diagnosis, management, delivery timing, and postpartum follow-up for gestational diabetes | ACOG |
| Thromboembolism in Pregnancy, Practice Bulletin No. 196 | ACOG | July 2018 | Risk factors, diagnosis, management, and prevention of venous thromboembolism in pregnancy and the postpartum period, including anticoagulation around delivery | ACOG |
| First and Second Stage Labor Management, Clinical Practice Guideline No. 8 | ACOG | 2024 | Definitions of labor and labor arrest and management of dystocia in the first and second stages of labor | ACOG |
| Levels of Maternal Care, Obstetric Care Consensus No. 9 | ACOG and SMFM | 2019, revises 2015 | Classification of maternal care facilities from basic (level I) through regional perinatal health care centers (level IV) for risk-appropriate care | ACOG |
| SMFM Consult Series #67: Maternal Sepsis | Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine | 2023 | Recognition and management of sepsis during pregnancy and the postpartum period | PubMed |
| Obstetric Hemorrhage Patient Safety Bundle | Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health | Revised 2022 | Readiness, recognition, response, reporting, and respectful care elements for obstetric hemorrhage, adaptable to facility level | AIM |
| Severe Hypertension in Pregnancy Patient Safety Bundle | Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health | Revised 2022 | Readiness, recognition, response, reporting, and respectful care elements for severe hypertension during pregnancy and postpartum, across outpatient, emergency, and inpatient settings | AIM |
| WHO Recommendations: Intrapartum Care for a Positive Childbirth Experience | World Health Organization | 2018 | 56 recommendations on care during labor and childbirth for all women and their babies, irrespective of setting | WHO |
| Standards for Professional Registered Nurse Staffing for Perinatal Units | AWHONN | 2022 | Registered nurse to patient ratios across the spectrum of care for hospitalized pregnant and postpartum patients and their newborns | AWHONN |
How this section is used
For protocol development, start from the source list above. Each row links to the publishing society’s page or the journal landing page, which carries the full recommendation text, the evidence tables, and any corrections or focused updates issued since publication. ACOG in particular revises bulletins through Clinical Practice Updates, so the bulletin page is the place to confirm the current version. When the site’s obstetric syntheses publish, each will list its complete source set in its footnotes and will be linked from this page.
For point-of-care questions, Lumen retrieves from this corpus and cites the page it answers from. Departments that want the same source set available to every clinician on a unit can read about how an obstetric service runs these guidelines as one shared Lumen workspace.
Related departments
- Pediatrics & Neonatal, for neonatal resuscitation and newborn transition at the delivery-room interface
- Critical Care, for maternal sepsis, hemorrhagic shock, and massive transfusion once a patient needs ICU-level support
- Emergency Medicine, where severe hypertension, hemorrhage, and sepsis in pregnant and postpartum patients frequently present
- Vascular Access, for the peripheral and central access that underlies hemorrhage response and magnesium and antihypertensive infusion
- Infection Prevention, for surgical site and device-associated infection after cesarean birth
- Neurology & Stroke, for antiseizure medication in pregnancy and stroke in the peripartum period
- Hospital Medicine, for venous thromboembolism prophylaxis and inpatient glycemic management that overlap the obstetric bulletins
- Pharmacy, for anticoagulation and medication use in pregnancy and lactation
- Surgery & Trauma, for surgical antimicrobial prophylaxis and the surgical safety checklist as applied to cesarean birth
Frequently asked questions
What does the obstetrics and maternal care section of The Clinical Database cover?
The section indexes the professional-society guidelines that govern obstetric and maternal care: ACOG practice bulletins and clinical practice guidelines on hypertensive disorders, postpartum hemorrhage, gestational diabetes, thromboembolism, and labor management, the ACOG and SMFM levels of maternal care consensus, the SMFM maternal sepsis consult, the AIM patient safety bundles for obstetric hemorrhage and severe hypertension, the WHO intrapartum care recommendations, and the AWHONN perinatal staffing standards. Each row carries the publisher, current edition, scope, and a link to the source.
Which societies publish the guidelines indexed here?
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health, the World Health Organization, and the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses.
How are ACOG practice bulletins and clinical practice updates handled in the table?
The table lists the governing practice bulletin or clinical practice guideline with its publication year. Where ACOG has issued a focused Clinical Practice Update that revises part of a bulletin, the edition column notes it and the source link goes to the bulletin page, which carries the update history. Always confirm the current version on the ACOG page before building a protocol from it.
Does this page contain treatment recommendations?
No. This page and the guidelines index list the governing documents and their scope. Recommendation-level content, including blood pressure thresholds, medication doses, and management algorithms, belongs to the reviewed guideline syntheses, which will be linked here as they are published. Local protocols and medical direction govern actual care.
How does Lumen use this section?
Lumen retrieves from The Clinical Database corpus when answering point-of-care questions and cites the page it drew from. As obstetric and maternal care syntheses are added, they become part of that retrievable corpus alongside the guideline index on this page.