
Sue Down
Professor of Midwifery Studies at University of Central Lancashire; OBE-awarded expert on normal birth and maternity care policy
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Jul 21, 2026
Professor Soo Downe | Midwifery, compassion and challenging the system
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Sue DownGUEST
changed practice? I think on the broader sense, and this is an international example I'm going to give you.

Sue DownGUEST
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.

Sue DownGUEST
And they saw that and they said, okay, we're about to redo our guidelines on antenatal intrapartum postnatal care.

Sue DownGUEST
Would you do some, we've never incorporated women's views before and experiences into these guidelines.
9 MINS LATER

Judith JohnsonHOST
Why do you think that it's important that more midwives in particular get into research?
Mothers and babies died after failures at NHS trust
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I mean, just starting on the regulation, though, what is your sort of thoughts? What's your impression from what you just heard?

Sue DownGUEST
Clearly, there are regulators from a range of different professional groups, not just nurses and midwives involved here.

Sue DownGUEST
I think it's quite easy to say that this is all about individual clinical practitioners.

Sue DownGUEST
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.

Sue DownGUEST
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.
