I provide public health advice and support on health and health inequalities. I am the public health lead and Chair of Trustees for the Zero2 Expo initiative in the UK.
My main work, though, is in Global Health, particularly in India, where I have co-led a programme to make make maternal health care more woman-centred, kind and respectful, and evidence-based, instead of mechanised and over-medicalised.
I have worked with Ministries of Health in Africa, to draft national public health legislation, and to engage health profession leaders in national collaborative working.
When offered opportunities, I work at national, State, facility and community levels, on strategic health improvement and policy, but also on curriculum, analysis, assessment, clinical outcome improvement, epidemiological needs assessment, and to engage multi-disciplinary and multi-sector partnerships to improve health.
While I have, over many years, worked on a range of health-transforming initiatives, the achievement I’m most proud of is to have co-designed the curriculum and training for a new maternal health profession in India – the Professional Midwives at Fernandez Hospital. They have since established their own woman-centred profession, and working with medical and other colleagues, have achieved some fantastic outcomes for thousands of women in Telangana, including really low intervention rates in labour and extremely high rates of breastfeeding within the first hour of birth. Thanks to Dr Evita Fernandez and colleagues, I am currently working with them, in a partnership with UNICEF and the Telangana Government to help roll out this maternal health-transforming initiative to wider Indian populations. We plan this to become a model for evidence-based, woman-centred care more widely in India and then in other low- and medium-income countries.