National Student Midwife Experience Festival

Selena Ryan-Vig
Knowledge Broker
Cochrane UK

Selena Ryan-Vig is a Knowledge Broker at Cochrane UK. Her role involves sharing Cochrane evidence in accessible ways, managing Cochrane UK’s website and social media accounts, and producing newsletters. With a colleague, Selena delivers interactive sessions to students from Years 10 to 13 to teach about evidence-based practice and to encourage critical thinking, particularly around healthcare claims made in the media. She also co-delivers talks for students to raise awareness of Cochrane and reliable, evidence-based resources. She has a psychology degree from the University of Bath. During her degree, she worked for a national charity which provides support for young women.

Dr Jacqui Williams
Senior Midwifery Advisor (Education)
Nursing and Midwifery Council

Jacqui Williams is a very experienced midwifery academic and practising midwife with over 30 years involvement in pre- and post-registration midwifery programmes.

As an academic, Jacqui has continued to keep strong links with midwifery practice and is passionate about the unique role of the midwife and women centred care. She is a Senior Fellow with the Higher Education Academy. She has particular area of expertise in quality assurance.

Her education interests are in open and distance learning and she has created resources for open access repositories including developing a unique midwifery repository. Jacqui is also an experienced midwifery expert witness.

Her doctoral work is researching whether or not resilience develops in student midwives as they navigate the undergraduate midwifery programme.

Jacqui’s current role is to support the development of the new midwifery education standards and the wider work on midwifery matters across the NMC.

Verena Wallace MBE
Senior Midwifery Advisor (Policy)
Nursing and Midwifery Council

Verena Wallace was appointed as the NMC’s Senior Midwifery Adviser (Policy) in January 2019.

Most recently Verena was the Midwifery and Children’s Nursing Officer at the Department of Health in Northern Ireland. She was the Local Supervising Authority Midwifery Officer (LSAMO) for nine years until 2015, having previously held senior roles as a Deputy Chief Nurse, Head of Midwifery and Consultant Midwife for Public Health.

Verena trained as a general nurse in Belfast and has worked as a midwife in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland.

Fran McConville
Midwifery Adviser
World Health Organisation

Fran McConville qualified as a midwife and a nurse, has a BSc in Zoology and an MSc in Health Economics. After being a VSO midwife in Bangladesh in the mid-1980’s, Fran spent much of her career in sexual, reproductive, maternal and newborn health and gender in South East Asia, Africa and the Middle East, working with a range of NGO’s and UN agencies and as a Health Adviser to the UK department of international development (DFID).

Fran is currently the Midwifery Adviser to the World Health Organization, based in Geneva, providing technical and policy support to the 194 Member States. Fran lives with her partner and they have three grownup sons, all born at home with the compassionate expert care of midwives. She is passionate about the rights of women, newborns and their families to have access to quality midwifery care everywhere, and ensuring that the care provided is based not only on existing evidence but on knowledge that challenges assumptions and arises from asking different questions.

Professor Jayne Marshall
Foundation Professor of Midwifery / Lead Midwife for Education
University of Leicester

Jayne Marshall is an experienced midwife, lecturer and external examiner and over her career has been instrumental in developing and implementing innovative midwifery and inter-professional curricula across the range of academic levels. She is the University of Leicester’s Foundation Professor of Midwifery and Lead Midwife for Education, tasked with developing a new faculty of Midwifery academics alongside implementing an innovative 4-year undergraduate Master in Science Midwifery with Leadership programme in partnership with the University Hospitals Leicester NHS Trust.

Jayne trained as a nurse at Guy’s Hospital, London and undertook midwifery training at Kings College Hospital, London, moving into midwifery education early in her career. Her first role in education was at the University of Nottingham where she held a variety of teaching and leadership roles, becoming Associate Professor before leaving to take up appointment as the Head of the School of Midwifery and Child Health and Lead Midwife for Education at Kingston University, St George’s University of London. As a result of Faculty restructuring, Jayne was promoted to Associate Dean for Practice Education and Workforce Development across seven health and social care professions. She was the first midwife at Kingston and St George’s to be promoted to Professor of Midwifery via the learning and teaching route. Jayne is also a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, an Aurora Role Model and mentor for the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education and holds the position of visiting Professor of Midwifery at Kingston and St Georges.

Jayne’s particular interests lie in the complexities surrounding professional issues, law and ethics relating to midwifery practice and optimising the experiences of women and their families throughout the childbirth continuum: subjects upon which she has written a number of publications and the focus of her PhD study, an ethnographic study into intrapartum informed consent. In addition, Jayne has a wealth of experience in co-editing key midwifery text books including the 16th and 17th editions of Myles Textbook for Midwives (the world’s best-selling seminal midwifery textbook). This book has been adapted for use in Sub-Saharan Africa, (now in its 3rd edition) and more recently has been translated into Korean and Greek.

In an international capacity, Jayne is a member of the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) Education Standing Committee.

Nicky Clark
Chair of Lead Midwife for Education Strategic Reference Group
Nursing and Midwifery Council

Nicky is the Chair of the NMC Lead Midwife for Education Strategic reference group, which is an active stakeholder group for midwifery education across the UK.

She qualified as a registered general nurse in 1982 and as a midwife in 1986, and has been in midwifery education since 1990 working in several institutions.

Nicky has been the Lead Midwife for Education at the University of Hull since 2008, and is the Head of Midwifery and Child. She has undertaken many national and international external collaborations, working in the UK and across Europe and Asia providing expert advice on programme approvals in midwifery, and also undertaking institutional quality assurance reviews across the UK and Croatia. She is a NMC quality assurance reviewer, a NTFS peer reviewer and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Nicky has been, and continues to be, actively involved at a strategic level in national developments within midwifery. This includes the Maternity Transformation programme (NHS England) with the development of a new Model of Supervision and also as part of the Maternity Workforce steering group. Additionally, Nicky was a member of the Future Midwife working group at the Council of Deans of Health and the Future Midwife Sponsoring Board at the NMC.

Nicky is extremely passionate about midwifery and is totally committed to ensuring quality and excellence in the education of all those who experience it.

Charlotte Kirton
Newly Qualified Midwife

Charlotte Kirton is 21 and a newly qualified midwife having recently completed her degree at Northumbria University.

In light of recent national reports and reviews of maternity services, she’s passionate about how to better the experiences and wellbeing of midwives in the workforce to enhance and improve the provision of care to people accessing midwifery services, including addressing nationwide issues such as staffing levels and burnout.

Her undergraduate dissertation, which she’lll be sharing and discussing at the festival, focused on the experiences of newly qualified midwives during their preceptorship and how this can be improved to better retain and inspire midwives in the earlier stages of their career.

Samantha Perry

Student Midwife

University of Southampton

Lynda Ware
Senior Fellow in General Practice
Cochrane UK

Lynda is a Senior Fellow in General Practice with Cochrane UK. Her background is in primary care and she was a GP partner in rural Oxfordshire for over thirty years with particular clinical interests in psychiatry and women’s health.  Since joining Cochrane UK in 2014, she has visited many village halls and community centres around Oxford talking to non-medical audiences about evidence-based medicine (EBM) and its relevance to everyday life. With a colleague, Lynda now visits schools to meet students from Years 10 to 13 to teach about EBM and to encourage critical thinking, particularly around health care claims made in the media. She blogs about Cochrane reviews for the Evidently Cochrane website. You can read Lynda’s blogs on Evidently Cochrane here.

Nicole Rajan-Brown
Student Midwife
University of Salford

Nicole Rajan-Brown is a third-year student at the University of Salford, Editor-in-Chief at The Student Midwife Journal, and co-chair of her university’s Midwifery Society.

Nicole has a background in research in Linguistics, and is also a qualified hypnobirthing practitioner.  Nicole is passionate about building confidence in leadership skills across midwifery careers, particularly for student midwives, and promoting positive birth experiences for service users.  When she qualifies, Nicole would like to work in a continuity team, and continue to pursue her love for research.

Beyond midwifery, Nicole loves to spend time with her family, exploring the outdoors and getting creative.

Sheena Byrom OBE
Director
All4Maternity

I qualified as a midwife in the 1970’s and have worked since in all areas of practice, including 9 years as a consultant midwife, and latterly as a head of midwifery. I currently work as an independent midwifery consultant providing support to NHS maternity services and global organisations, and I lecture nationally and internationally on childbirth related topics.

My midwifery memoirs, Catching Babies, is a Sunday Times bestseller, and my absolute passion is promoting normal physiological birth, and a positive childbirth experience for all women. I jointly edited The Roar Behind the Silence: why kindness, compassion and respect matter in maternity care with Professor Soo Downe OBE. This seminal book is being used globally as a resource to improve maternity services.

Our new book, Squaring the Circle: researching normal birth in a technological world will be published in Spring 2018. I was awarded an OBE in 2011 for services to midwifery, and I received an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Midwives in 2015. In 2016 I was delighted to receive an Honorary Doctorate from Bournemouth University.

Pia Caprioli, 3rd Year Student, Robert Gordon University

Pia (she/her) is a third-year student midwife at Robert Gordon University. Her passion for Midwifery travels back to her early twenties, when she was close to complete her Bachelors in Modern Literature, followed by a Masters in Creative Writing, both allowing her to explore the topics of women’s discrimination and obstetric violence in post-war Italy.

After some work experience in literary, publishing and communication agencies, three years ago she moved to Scotland to work as clinical support worker in Reproductive Health, before applying to the course. One of her main areas of interest is gender discrimination and violence, broad and subtle phenomena that still define the worldwide society. Her presentation aims to shed some light over the actual prevalence of domestic abuse and the difference midwives and students can make in the prevention of poor perinatal outcomes and long-term adverse consequences on the physical and psychological health of mums and babies.

Recently, Pia has also become a member of The Student Midwife Journal Editorial Board.

Lauren Kennedy, 3rd Year Student, Robert Gordon University.

Lauren Kennedy is a 3rd year student Midwife at RGU, Aberdeen. Lauren is originally from Lanarkshire, Scotland and will be presenting with a Charlotte Bevan discussing sensitive midwifery care to pregnant people with history of childhood sexual abuse.

Charlotte Bevan, 3rd Year Student, Robert Gordon University.

Charlotte is a third year student from RGU in Aberdeen. Charlotte is from the North of Scotland and has a passion for delivering midwifery care to birthing people and babies with increased complexity of needs. Charlotte will jointly present with Lauren Kennedy on midwifery care for women who are survivors of childhood sexual abuse.