>Dear Heather:
>
>Actually, I will repeat what I said in a more lengthy post.  The 
>neonatologists concluded that
>the scale WAS accurate and I looked at the details and that's 
>exactly what their data
>showed.
>
>And no, I have not seen the scale give an inaccurate reading, unless 
>an article of clothing
>was removed or the scale was sitting on an unstable surface.  And that is NOT
>measurement error, it is observer error for not using the scale properly.

I wasn't referring to any particular study in my post, Susan.

Jack Newman's new book 'The Latch' has two pics of the same baby 
taken on scales, 5 minutes apart. Both sets of scales were new, 
digital and in working order. The difference was, IIRC, about 100 g. 
Both scales cannot be accurate.

In my own experience, I have witnessed the same baby being weighed on 
the same scales, on the same surface, by the same (very experienced) 
weigher, with a two minute gap. The difference was about 25 g (no 
spit up, no elimation, no dribbling).

I have become aware of many discrepancies  - individual examples 
include the baby weighed at home and then weighed 20 mins later in 
the hospital (sent to hospital because of severe weight loss, 
lethargy, floppy, and the weight loss was far greater in the 
hospital...baby was practically comatose by this time); the baby 
whose birthweight turned out to be recorded inaccurately in the 
mother's notes (differed from hospital notes); the baby whose weight 
was one thing in metric and another in imperial (I have come across 
this many times - it is an artefact of the way we still, wrongly IMO, 
use both systems) and clinical interventions being carried out on the 
basis of the 'wrong' one; the health visitor or midwife who reads the 
previous notes wrongly and then sets in place interventions based 
purely on this (again, many times).

Of course many of these are operator error, but in the real world, 
operators make errors.  Any research done on the efficacy of weighing 
as an intervention has to take account of this.

Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc, tutor, UK

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