Best Practice Guidelines for referrals to Sonographers

To optimise the care of pregnant women, it makes sense to offer scanning by a sonographer only if the pregnancy does not have any risk factors that require medical expertise and the scan is unlikely to reveal findings that require further testing or in-depth counselling outside a sonographer’s scope of practice. Such cases are best scanned primarily by a medical practitioner with fetal medicine expertise to avoid a subsequent referral from the sonographer to the expert, at significant additional cost to the parents.