General Physiological Obstetrics Department

General Physiological Obstetrics

The Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital Affiliated with Fudan University was the first specialized obstetrics and gynecology hospital in China. The Department of Obstetrics of the Red House Hospital, established in 1957, edited the first textbook of Obstetrics and Gynecology, performed China's first extraperitoneal cesarean section, established China's external pelvic measurement data for women, and founded the first high-risk ward. Its annual number of deliveries once exceeded 16,000.

In May 2019, the Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital Affiliated with Fudan University established the Department of Obstetrics and Neonatology. General Physiological Obstetrics became an independent department, and, together with Maternal Pathological Obstetrics and Fetal Pathological Obstetrics, formed the Department of Obstetrics, which belongs to the Department of Obstetrics and Neonatology.

General Pathological Obstetrics is a clinical department integrating clinical care, research, and teaching. Under the leadership of Professor Li Xiaotian, the academic discipline leader; Professor Cheng Haidong, the academic advisor; and Professor Gu Weirong, Director of the Department of Obstetrics and Neonatology, a tiered team of professionals centered on General Physiological Obstetrics has been established. There are more than 30 physicians: 5 chief physicians and 6 associate chief physicians; among them are 3 doctoral supervisors and 2 master's supervisors. It has 2 wards, in Huangpu and Yangpu, and 2 delivery rooms, with more than 110 permanent beds and 30 VIP rooms. It provides early pregnancy clinics, perinatal medicine clinics, delivery assessment clinics, nutrition clinics, psychological clinics for pregnant and postpartum women, midwife consultation clinics, breastfeeding clinics, postpartum clinics, special-needs clinics, obstetric specialist clinics, and childbirth education classes, among others. The department focuses on health management for pregnant and postpartum women, reducing the incidence of pregnancy complications and comorbidities, and providing medical support and humanistic care for natural childbirth. It improves the childbirth experience; both the doula accompaniment rate and the labor analgesia rate exceed 70%. By strictly adhering to medical standards and applying midwifery techniques, it improves the success rate of trials of vaginal labor, reduces the rate of episiotomy, and lowers the cesarean section rate. It has established the indications and procedures for vaginal birth after cesarean section, external cephalic version for breech presentation, breech delivery, and vaginal delivery of twins, creating opportunities for vaginal delivery for more pregnant women. It introduced modern delivery-room management concepts and took the lead in integrating the operating room, traditional delivery room, and intensive care unit. Through multidisciplinary collaboration among obstetrics, anesthesiology, neonatology, and other departments, it established standardized procedures and management models, achieving good maternal and neonatal outcomes in clinical practice involving the rescue of critical emergencies such as emergency cesarean section, eclamptic convulsions, uterine rupture, and shoulder dystocia.

As a national-level teaching base for obstetrics and gynecology, our department trains more than 100 resident physicians annually through standardized residency training, specialty training, and refresher training. It has many outstanding municipal- and university-level instructors for standardized residency training. As a key department of a teaching hospital, it completes the teaching of major lectures in Chinese and English, as well as clinical observation and internship training, for the five-year and eight-year programs and international students of Fudan University Medical School. Each year, it holds national-level study courses to promote such leading programs as high-risk obstetric management, the multidisciplinary consultation model in obstetrics, and obstetric emergency rescue simulation drills. It undertakes multiple national-, ministerial-, and provincial-level research projects, including General and Young Scientists' Fund projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China; projects under the National Key Basic Research Development Program (973 Program); National Tenth Five-Year Plan research projects; National Eleventh Five-Year Plan supporting projects; key clinical discipline projects of the Ministry of Health; National Thirteenth Five-Year Plan research projects; and multiple Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Commission and Health Bureau fund projects. It has published hundreds of papers, including papers in SCI-indexed and core journals.

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