Numeracy for midwives

First Steps Publishing Ltd. (2011)

Second Edition 2015

First Steps Publishing Ltd., Unit 17, Hurlingham Studios, Ranelagh Gardens,

London SW6 3PA

Copyright © First Steps Ltd.

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Tel.: 02077366889

All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without either the prior written permission by the Publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying in the United Kingdom issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd..

ISBN 978-0-9553558-3-7

Dear Reader,

My name is Christine and I will attempt to guide you through physical and mathematical terminology and its usage.

I suggest you attempt to solve the problems yourself, so that you will practice what you have seen.

I do hope that this will be beneficial to you and that by working through this material you will acquire the tools needed for your chosen profession.

Should you feel that something you would have liked to have seen in this course was missing, please let me know and I will see what can be done about it.

My contact details are shown below.

Christine Butenuth

[email protected]

Tel: 0207 736 6889

Below are two examples from the NHS list of examination questions; they are examples of what you might be faced with in your professional life:

•Q1: Penicillin has been prescribed to a patient. The amount he is to take by mouth (oral) is 375mg. But the package from which this amount is to be dispensed has only tablets of 125mg in it. How many of these tablets is the patient to be given?

•Q2: If the same patient has been prescribed 500mg but this time the penicillin is to be dispensed in a liquid form where 125mg of penicillin are to be found in 5ml of fluid how many milli-litres (ml) does the patient need to receive?

The following pages will show you how to find answers to these sorts of questions.

To start with we will be talking about money in the form of currencies.

I hope that by introducing many ideas this way you will soon appreciate how familiar you already are with many of these mathematical and physical topics. But you have probably never quite thought about things this way.

We will then continue our journey into length measurements, fractions, areas and volumes.

Having seen all this we will briefly touch on what a density is, how to define a force and what acceleration does to you, to name a few other topics, and to close we will talk very briefly about predictions, especially from graphs, and end by looking very briefly at statistics.

List of contents

Concept of quality and quantity

How much money is in your purse?

•Why is it important to be aware that both a quantity and a quality is needed?

•Points to remember

•How to work out a sum of different units in one currency for example

•Remarks on currencies

•Adding different currencies

•A general rule of conversion

•Converting different currencies

Length, area, volume

•Length measurement

•Fractions

– Rules for calculations with fractions

•Decimals

•Percentages

•Unit conversions

•Length, area, volume units

•Area determination

•Volume calculations

•General points to notice

•Experimental determination of a volume

Density, Force, acceleration

•Density

•Notes regarding related units

– Concentrations

•Prefixes

•Force

•Definition of a force

•Force (=weight) but there are many