If she is squatting and straining and nothing is coming out then she needs help most likely, unless she passes it within a day. Sometimes they don't lay smaller eggs to begin with, they make a whopper and try to lay that first, in which case every bit of help is necessary.
Simple ways to help her can be to add more calcium to the diet (crushed eggshells are great for that) in case it's muscular weakness behind the issue, and/or use some kind of lubrication (cold pressed olive oil would do) either orally or into the vent area. Or both. There are other lubricants you can also use. If the calcium does the trick you should add more calcium to all your hens' diets since it could well be a widespread deficiency. Most hens need more calcium than what is supplied in the average bag of layer feed, even though the manufacturers often state it's 'complete'. They begin laying down calcium deposits in their leg bones etc before they go into lay so only supplementing them at P.O.L. is bad advice for many flocks.
Generally lack of raw oils in the diet is one of the biggest things to blame, it's no use putting vitamin E and other oils in their pellets like the manufacturers do when their next step is to cook the pellets, since that ruins the oil. They will mostly survive for two years or so on such pellets, not totally thrive and certainly not likely experience longevity. Commercial layer pellets are designed to keep them productive until the average cull date which is around 2 years old, also the time when a chicken is actually entering its adult prime but often becoming a little less productive in most breeds or severely less productive in high production layer breeds.
The importance of raw oils, especially those like cold pressed olive oil, in the diet is due to the dependence of the mucosal membranes on such oils for retaining flexibility and lubrication. If the only oils they get are cooked ones, then their mucous membranes are stiff and inflexible and egg binding, crop or gizzard binding, prolapse, etc are all much more common. Also, capillaries are less flexible too, and just like us chooks fairly commonly have cardiovascular disease due to so many consuming only cooked oils/fats/proteins. It's pretty normal for any animal raised on mainly cooked food to have numerous health issues.
I read once, years ago, when I was new to chooks, that if you use olive oil you won't have egg binding/prolapse problems in the flock, so I tried it, and I've never had a single case of egg binding or prolapse even though at this stage I've raised hundreds and hundreds of hens from all manner of breeds including breeds prone to such issues, and some family lines who regularly laid doubleyolkers which were twice the size of normal eggs.
Petroleum byproduct oils, or those known to be extremely high in pollutants, overprocessed, etc are all best avoided. Vegetable oils, mineral oil, cottonseed oil, etc are best not given at all. D-tocopherol is the right form of vitamin E but many feeds contain DL-tocopherol, which is synthetic and does not act the same in the body despite what manufacturers may claim. In some individuals it causes cysts to form. It's not healthy for the veins either unlike D tocopherol.
If you even just add, once a week, a teaspoon of cold pressed olive oil per hen to something like wholemeal bread or their pellets, or some rolled oats or whatever, it can make a big difference.
Best wishes, hope this helps.
