First head of midwifery research announced too, Professor Jane Sandall, with focus on this issue. She will report directly to Chief Midwifery Officer Professor Dunkley-Bent.
Inaugural head of midwifery research at NHS England announced
02 FEBRUARY, 2021 BY MEGAN FORD
A first-ever head of midwifery research has been appointed for England and one of her key focuses will be around ending racial health inequalities in maternity care.
Professor Jane Sandall, who has a clinical background in nursing, midwifery and health visiting, started in the new role at NHS England and NHS Improvement this week.
“The expertise she will bring in mobilising research and evidence will be invaluable” [said] Jacqueline Dunkley-Bent
Her appointment follows the creation of two similar new roles at NHS England and NHS Improvement in October last year focused on nursing research.
Professor Sandall is a professor of social science and women’s health at King’s College London and also works with the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) in South London and Tommy’s National Centre for Maternity Improvement.
In her new role, NHS England and NHS improvement said Professor Sandall would be focusing on health inequalities linked with maternity outcomes for families from Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds.
In recent months, calls have been made for urgent action to ensure maternity care is safer for BAME women.
During the coronavirus pandemic, concerns have also been raised around the volume of pregnant women admitted to hospital in the UK with Covid-19 who are from an ethnic minority background.
Professor Sandall said she was “delighted to be starting this exciting new role”.
She will report directly to Professor Jacqueline Dunkley-Bent, the chief midwifery officer (CMO) for England.
Working as part of the CMO team, Professor Sandall said she would be able to “bring together the NHS, universities and the NIHR so that we can create national policy which improves maternity care for women and their babies”.
Meanwhile, Professor Dunkley-Bent said it was a “pleasure” to welcome Professor Sandall to the team.
The expertise she will bring in mobilising research and evidence will be invaluable,” noted Professor Dunkley-Bent.
She added: “Research is just one of the tools we will be using to improve maternity care for mums and their babies in particular the experiences of women from Black, Asian and ethnic minority families.”
Professor Lorraine Harper, associate dean for the NIHR Academy, said: “We very much look forward to working with Professor Sandall to champion midwifery research and support the research community.
“This significant new role demonstrates the importance of building research capacity within the midwifery profession.”
www.nursingtimes.net/news/research-and-innovation/inaugural-head-of-midwifery-research-at-nhs-england-announced-02-02-2021/
Last time I clicked the Guardian it had a wall and asked to register but then it went away so idk but :
"'Something has to be done': tackling the UK's Black maternal health problem
This article is more than 5 months old
As the issue is raised in parliament, two women are campaigning for change within the medical community
Tinuke Awe hadn’t been long at her midwife’s appointment when her pregnancy started spinning out of her control. Despite her body swelling uncomfortably as her baby grew, it was only at that 38-week checkup that pre-eclampsia was diagnosed. The midwife’s message was stark: go straight to the hospital, your life could be in danger.
Once there she was given a vaginal pessary to induce labour, and told to expect nothing to happen for at least 24 hours. But a few hours later she was in agony. “I kept saying ‘I’m in pain, I’m in pain’, but I was completely dismissed and fobbed off – no one looked at me,” says Awe.
Rushed into a treatment room when midwives finally discovered she was on the verge of giving birth, she found she was too exhausted to push and her son was delivered with the help of forceps. “I was just left feeling like I didn’t matter, that no one really cared about me,” she says.
Her story is shocking but not uncommon. In the UK, Black women are five times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than white women, according to a 2019 report published by MBRRACE-UK. Black and minority ethnic groups are at greater risk of their baby dying in the womb or soon after birth, and at greater risk of severe long-term health problems. During the Covid-19 pandemic, 55% of pregnant women admitted to hospital with coronavirus were from BAME backgrounds.
This week the government has been put under mounting pressure to introduce targets to eradicate the disparity. At prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, asked Boris Johnson to commit to an inquiry into Black maternal mortality, describing the disparity as “truly shocking”.
Friday sees the first meeting of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ (RCOG) race equality taskforce, and the launch of “five steps for healthcare professionals”, devised with Fivexmore, a campaign group set up by Awe and her co-campaigner Clotilde Rebecca Abe.
“There are real people behind those statistics,” says Abe, who is also a co-chair of the St Thomas and Lambeth Maternity Voice Partnership and the creator of the social enterprise Prosperitys. “Something has to be done.”
An increasingly vocal consensus that direct action must be taken is also growing in the medical community. In July Prof Jacqueline Dunkley-Bent, England’s chief midwifery officer, explained to the parliamentary joint committee on human rights that a target had been set to provide continuity of care for 75% of BAME women. Asked if a target was needed to address mortality disparity, she said: “The short answer is absolutely, yes. One death where there is inequality because you are not on a level playing field is one death too many. "
Why does the inequality exist? According to Dr Christine Ekechi, a co-chair of RCOG’s race equality taskforce and a consultant obstetrician gynaecologist, Black women are more likely to have conditions that can put them at greater risk, including cardiac disease, diabetes and high blood pressure, but this is far from the full picture.
“The deeper question is: why are Black and Asian women more likely to have existing health conditions?” asks Ekechi. “There’s no specific gene that links all Asian people or a common gene that is found in all Black people. Many of these pre-existing conditions are non-communicable diseases which are driven by social determinants of health such as poverty, education and housing.”
Research from the US shows that when Black and Asian women do not have pre-existing medical conditions, have English as their first language and come from middle-class backgrounds, they still have worse outcomes compared with white women from a similar background, she adds. “There’s something more that’s happening there.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said Dunkley-Bent was leading work to reduce health inequalities, while government-funded research at Oxford University was investigating the increased risk of women and babies of a BAME background dying.
Introducing targets would indicate that the UK is determined to consign poor maternal health outcomes for Black women to history, says Ekechi. “What we don’t want is in the next reports to see that this disparity is widening.”
Awe, an HR executive who set up the support group Mums and Tea in the wake of her own experience as well as co-founding Fivexmore, is determined to stop that happening.
“In 1991 when my mum gave birth to me she was at greater risk of dying. In 2020 when I gave birth to my daughter that risk had increased and I was five times more likely to die,” she says. “I’ll be damned if my daughter, whenever she decides to give birth, is 25 times more likely to die.”"
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/oct/02/something-has-to-be-done-tackling-the-uks-black-maternal-health-problem
There is a link on this sentence "government-funded research at Oxford University" that takes you to: www.npeu.ox.ac.uk/pru-mnhc/research-themes/theme-3
"Why are Black and ethnic minority mothers more likely to die either during pregnancy, or within the first year of giving birth, compared to white mothers born in the UK? Jenny Kurinczuk & Marian Knight (Leads), Kathryn Bunch, Sara Kenyon"