Our Experts
Our board of experts includes leading figures in both research and practice relating to birth trauma. We are able to turn to them for professional advice and information on recent developments and we are indebted to them for their invaluable voluntary contributions.
Meet our Experts
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Clo is co-founder of the Five X More campaign to improve maternal health outcomes for Black mothers, and founder of @_prosperitys, a social enterprise supporting black, Asian and minority ethnic pregnant women.
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Scott is a renowned expert in paternal mental health and cultural differences. He is an accomplished keynote speaker, lecturer, parent educator and mental health trainer. With over 20 years of parenting experience and having faced personal challenges, Scott advises and educates organizations on better engagement with fathers. He led the Best Beginnings charity fathers’ advisory group and launched Fathers’ Beacon, a support group for frontline fathers in collaboration with Blue Minds from the Metropolitan Police force. Scott’s expertise is highly sought-after in the field of paternal mental health and fatherhood support.
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Amjad is a trainee surgeon and a neuroscientist. He has an interest in management of complications resulting in neurological injury to either mother or child and hypoxic brain injury.
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After a career in the NHS as a consultant obstetrician for 22 years, where Helen developed a special interest in supporting women who had experienced traumatic birth events, Helen moved to work in global maternal health where she has developed and delivered training interventions for midwives and doctors in low-resource countries.
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Susan is professor of maternal and child health at City University. Her main interest is the development of post-traumatic stress disorder after health events, particularly childbirth. She has undertaken qualitative and quantitative studies of traumatic birth and published widely on the topic.
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Ravi has been a consultant paediatrician in Chester since 2004 having trained in the north-east of England, Bristol, London and New South Wales. He believes passionately that the care of children should be a collaboration between clinicians, children and their families. He trains doctors and midwives in neonatal life support and has provided ongoing care to many babies and children who have had medical issues following traumatic births. He has provided medical insights for various broadcast and print media organisations over the years. In his spare time, he likes to run and cycle long distances very slowly, sings in a band and occasionally forays into amateur dramatics.
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Natalie qualified as a midwife in 2001 at the University of Manchester. She has experience of working in all areas of maternity; antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal care. She also spent time as a specialist fetal medicine midwife in a regional tertiary unit. For the past seven years Natalie has worked as a specialist mental health midwife within maternity services, supporting women experiencing moderate to severe mental health difficulties during their maternity journey. Natalie is currently the lead midwife for maternal mental health within a maternal mental health service offering supporting and psychological intervention to women who have experienced trauma and/or loss in their reproductive journey. She is passionate about ensuring that women are listened to and feel empowered in their maternity journeys, and that when births haven’t gone as hoped or expected that women and their families received appropriate care and support for both their physical and mental health.
Natalie works into the maternity, neonatal and local authority systems to offer training and guidance on embedding trauma informed care throughout services to improve the care experiences for women and families.
Natalie is particularly interested in supporting the development and improvement of the birth reflections/birth debriefs offer within maternity services so they are fully trauma informed and meet the needs of the women and their partners who access them.
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Pauline is professor in clinical psychology at the University of Liverpool and consultant clinical psychologist for Liverpool Women’s Hospital. She previously worked for the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals where she pioneered the Birth Trauma Clinic which has now developed into the South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw ‘Birth in Mind’ (Maternal Mental Health) Service. Previously she was deputy director for the clinical psychology unit at the University of Sheffield where she was involved from the beginning of the doctoral clinical psychology training programme. In addition to working with women, Professor Slade has pioneered programmes for preventing and managing post-traumatic stress in maternity staff. She has run numerous funded projects including randomised controlled trials, systematic reviews and qualitative research and published widely on the subject of maternal mental health. You can see a fuller biography here.
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Elizabeth is a registered midwife, lecturer and researcher on birth trauma. She was awarded the Dr Albert McKern Scholarship in collaboration with the Universities of Sydney, Yale and Edinburgh to undertake perinatal research into the cause, prevention and treatment of mental and physical distress related to childbirth. She obtained her PhD from the faculty of medicine at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her thesis is entitled: The link between somatic and psychological sequelae of traumatic vaginal birth. Findings were instrumental in founding the Australasian Birth Trauma Association. She is a member of the International Marcé Society for Perinatal Mental Health.
