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Sue Down

Sue Down

Professor of Midwifery Studies at University of Central Lancashire; OBE-awarded expert on normal birth and maternity care policy

Jul 21, 2026

18:14
there any examples where your research has
18:16
changed practice? I think on the broader sense, and this is an international example I'm going to give you.
18:21
So we have been working with the World Health Organization for quite a while now.
18:26
They picked up on some of the work we had done on why women don't use antenatal care, where we used qualitative evidence from systematic reviews and translated it into logic models so that we could explain what was going on in low-income countries.
18:40
And they saw that and they said, okay, we're about to redo our guidelines on antenatal intrapartum postnatal care.
18:46
Would you do some, we've never incorporated women's views before and experiences into these guidelines.
18:51
They've always been based on Cochrane reviews and clinical outcomes.

9 MINS LATER

27:28
Why do you think that it's important that more midwives in particular get into research?
11:43
I mean, just starting on the regulation, though, what is your sort of thoughts? What's your impression from what you just heard?
11:51
I think all the regulators need to be paying attention to what's going on here.
11:55
Clearly, there are regulators from a range of different professional groups, not just nurses and midwives involved here.
12:00
I think it's quite easy to say that this is all about individual clinical practitioners.
12:07
Sometimes it is.
12:08
But as the Oppenden report very clearly said, there are a lot of system-wide failures that were evident at Nottingham, and I'm quite sure this is also true elsewhere.
12:17
So I think it's very easy to, if you like, blame the last person in the line that's the consequence of those failures.
12:42
Why are those reviews not leading to solutions?

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