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Hannah Alice King

Award Received: 
Jean Davies Award
Project: 
PhD research into the impact of racism on maternal mortality, and designing and delivering "Birth without Bias" workshop
Year awarded: 
2024

I split the Iolanthe Awards funding into two aspects of work to help address the disparities in outcomes for ethnic minority women giving birth in the U.K.

Despite increasing coverage and work from grass roots campaigners and organisations, disparities in outcomes still exist in maternity for women minoritised as Black or Asian in the U.K. in relation to stillbirth, miscarriage, preterm birth, maternal mortality and neonatal mortality.

These disparities have been evident for at least 3 decades and little progress has been made in reducing the disparities in a centralised significant and sustained manner.

I have chosen to investigate the impact of racism on maternal mortality in the U.K. as the final component of my studies at UCLan for the Professional Doctorate in Health programme.

The research question which I will investigate is

"A mixed methods exploratory sequential design investigating the experiences of Global Majority women who have been service users of U.K. maternity healthcare systems (phase 1) and the reflection of these findings from clinicians who work in the U.K. maternity healthcare systems (phase 2): analysis of presence of perceived interpersonal and institutional racism."

The first year of these studies which laid the theoretical foundations for the research were funded by the majority of the Jean Davies Award.

The second component of the Jean Davies Award funding was used towards designing and undertaking a face-to-face anti racism workshop for the multi-disciplinary obstetric team at the trust
where I am a labour ward coordinator.

With the funding I was also able to pay an expert external speaker, Derin Webb, who is a cultural safety and ethnic minority engagement midwife in the North West of the U.K. Derin added invaluable insight into the workshop where we collaboratively designed and delivered a 3 hour session which promoted fantastic and insightful discussions.

The feedback for the sessions was overwhelmingly positive with 100% of participants learning something new about cultural safety.

Participants said

‘Such a brilliant session. I learned so much and will definitely take this learning into my practice and management,’

‘so pleased to have attended, look forward to any further sessions in the future,’

‘the training needs to be mandatory for all staff.’

Topics introduced during the workshop included white fragility, maternal disparities, white privilege and cultural safety. All participants were given a supplementary reading booklet for the workshop
and also a certificate of attendance for evidence of their professional development.