Campaign: Amanda Burleigh has won her battle

A midwife has won a decade-long battle to give mothers more time attached to their newborns before the umbilical cord is cut.

Amanda Burleigh was convinced that clamping the cord within seconds of delivery – shutting off the blood supply from the placenta – was wrong.

Since the 1950s, when doctors and midwives started giving women a hormonal injection to reduce the risk of haemorrhage, they have clamped the cord within seconds of birth. They feared the drug – since replaced with a safer substitute – could harm the baby.

But Ms Burleigh, a midwife at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, believed it was unnatural to clamp the cord when it was still visibly pulsating with blood.

She said: ‘One day I had a brainwave and thought, “We all clamp the cord within seconds of the baby being born, but we are doing it without any evidence about whether it’s good or bad for the baby.”'

She contacted other medics, including obstetrician Dr David Hutchon, and together the group amassed evidence that stopping the blood flow so early could be harmful.

One study showed immediate cord-clamping could deprive a baby of a third of its blood stock – enough to fill a medium-size wine glass.

In particular, they found the practice raised the risk of iron deficiency anaemia. A tenth of all toddlers are anaemic, which is linked to delays in learning, speaking and understanding.

There is also growing evidence that immediate cord-clamping can be particularly harmful for premature babies.

They have finally succeeded in getting the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to change its guidelines. NICE now states that doctors and midwives should not routinely clamp the cord ‘earlier than one minute from the birth of the baby’.

The cord should be clamped within five minutes, but left longer if the mother requests. Besides the medical benefits, the change means mothers get the chance to hold their babies for a moment while still connected to them.

Ms Burleigh, a midwife for 26 years, said she had to overcome persistent doubts from colleagues, who asked who she was to query medical protocol.

‘There was quite a lot of resistance from both doctors and midwives,’ she said. ‘At times I felt like a whistleblower.’

There is also growing evidence that immediate cord-clamping can be particularly harmful for premature babies

However, she said she felt a ‘moral duty’ to challenge a practice that was not grounded in evidence.

Dr Hutchon, now retired, said hospitals had blindly clamped and cut within seconds of birth for decades.

He said: ‘We didn’t notice we were doing any harm because we were doing it to every baby.’

He became interested in 2003 after hearing that more premature babies survived when the cord was not cut early. But he said there was ‘continual resistance to change’ – with some doctors refusing delayed cord-clamping even today.

Some still believed the theory that immediate clamping reduced the risk of mothers haemorrhaging, Dr Hutchon said, even though a 2013 study found it made no difference.

Ms Burleigh, recently named Midwife of the Year by the British Journal Of Midwifery, added: ‘In 20 or 30 years I think we will look back on immediate cord-clamping and think, “What were we doing? We dropped an absolute clanger."'