About

I am passionate about empowering women and their families and this translates within my teaching through my experience of working in areas of multiple deprivation. The research and evidence into practice work I have been involved in reflects this passion through promoting normal birth with women from compromised communities and backgrounds.

I am course lead for PGCert Perinatal Mental Health. As Athena SWAN Champion, I led the successful Bronze Athena Swan Award for the Nursing & Midwifery Department achieved in May 2016.

I link with all midwifery areas within Doncaster & Bassetlaw District General hospital and the community midwifery teams to ensure student experience is optimal and practice partners feel supported in their assessment of students.

I continue to practice as a midwife, regularly running an Examination of the Newborn clinic.

I am also interested in these areas of practice:

• Community midwifery, working as a multi-agency team
• Community demographics and change management
• Project work, previous experience in communities and University of leading implementation and continuation of new ways of working and new processes and procedures

Teaching

I teach across the BSc (Hons) Midwifery and Distance Learning PGCert Perinatal and Maternal Mental Health courses.  My specific areas of teaching interest are:

• Perinatal public Health
• Normality in pregnancy, labour and birth, normalising the birth experience
• Clinical skills/OSCE's, assessment of fitness to practice
• Management & Leadership, developing students towards qualification and beyond
• IPE, working together, developing links to inter professional and disciplinary teams
• Newborn Physical Examination/cultural competence Masters module development
• Vulnerabilities, how this impacts on pregnancy, birth and the development of the family and community
• Female empowerment, engagement of women from hard to reach backgrounds in public health initiatives, perinatal wellbeing and the impact this has upon families and the betterment of the community

I teach inter-professional education as part of the Enhancing Quality of Services Through Effective Collaborative Practice module. I am Module leader for the following modules:

• Midwifery Advancing Practice (Level 5)
• Midwifery Consolidating Practice (Level 6)
• Midwifery Management and Leadership (Level 6)

Research

My expertise and research interest are:

• Working with vulnerable groups

• Normality in pregnancy, labour and birth

• Newborn Physical Examination

• Public health

• Female empowerment

I am currently working with the research team on the ORAMMA study, an evaluation of a peer support mechanism for refugee and asylum seeking women.

Publications

Postgraduate supervision

As well as the PGCert Perinatal Mental Health, I support MSc dissertation students who have proposals related to midwifery.