Getting Ready for Cervical Assessment Skills Day
 
Welcome to one of the most hands-on skills in your midwifery training and practice. Cervical assessment is a skill that cannot be learned from a diagram or practiced with ungloved hands on static objects – it lives in your fingers as proprioception, and it is developed through repetition, feedback, and honest tactile experience.
 
To help you in building that muscle memory and proprioception, we invite you to gather a few items to practice with during class. The fruit on this list offers something no plastic model can – soft, yielding, biological texture that gives your hands a first conversation with what they are learning to read. You do not need all of it, or even any of it, but if you can bring some, we will prepare it together on screen at the start of our session.
 
Please bring:
• Baby doll with a hard molded head, close to life size (an anatomical teaching doll is ideal, but any child’s doll with a molded plastic head will do)
• One stretchy adult-size sock you don’t mind cutting up (wool or hand-knitted work too) 
• Non-sterile gloves
• 1 pack Sterile gloves
• Tube Water-based lubricant or several packs 
 
If you have them, bring those too:
• Any cervical assessment tools / models you already own
• Any drawings, illustrations, or teaching graphics of cervical assessment
• A model pelvis if you have
• 1 or more fresh pack Mushrooms (cap variety, not oyster mushrooms)
• 1 or more Banana
• 1 or more ripe or semi-ripe Avocado
• 1 or more Papaya 
• 1 or more Honeydew or cantaloupe
• Spoon, knife, and cutting board or chux pad
 
This session is the second in our Midwifery Wisdom Lab Series – following our Suturing Lab – and we are just getting started. These hands-on, skill-building sessions exist because you asked for more practical training, and we want to keep building what you actually need. If there are skills you are hungry to practice, techniques you want to revisit, or gaps you keep bumping into in your work, please let us know. This series belongs to you and your input shapes where we go next.