Developing research capacity is a high priority for our team. Many of our researchers have come to research as clinicians, students or service users first — with a passion for making things better for women and babies.
We have been lucky enough to have a number of students working with us on summer fellowships or student research placements the last couple of years.
Summer 2021 – King’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship (KURF) holders, medical students Ritika Roy and Cecelia Gray, completed a systematic review and metasynthesis of research about women’s experiences of seeking to plan a vaginal breech birth. They presented a poster on their results at the British Intrapartum Care Society (BICS) conference in September 2022 and plan to submit a paper for publication.
2021/2022 – Masters student Hannah Mullins is collecting data for the Optimal Intervals 2 study at Frimley. Her work will build on Emma Spillane’s original work about optimal intervals for vaginal breech births, testing if the hypotheses are correct across a larger, multi-site sample.
Spring 2022 – Leicester University midwifery student Keelie Cristie completed a research elective with the OptiBreech team. She helped set up the Optimal Intervals 2 study at Leicester University Hospital and began data collection. She has also helped process some anonymised interview data.
Summer 2022 – This summer we are lucky enough to have three KURF fellows. Medical student Victoria Taiwo is helping to develop a protocol and instrument to survey the extend of midwives working autonomously to provide various aspects of breech care (scanning, ECV, counselling, attending births) in the UK.
Midwifery student Joanne Kotun is analysing anonymised interview data to contribute to our analysis of facilitators and barriers to implementing team care for physiological breech births. She also worked on setting up the optimal intervals study at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital.
Midwifery student Jacana Bresson has completed a review of textbooks in the Wellcome collection and Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists library. She reviewed historical guidance provided about the optimal lengths of time to be taken in vaginal breech births, to compare to our emerging optimal intervals evidence. She also present her findings at the BICS conference.
And midwifery student Sophie Rayner was awarded a Wellcome Trust Biomedical Vacation Scholarship. With this time, she completed the data collection on the optimal intervals study at Leicester and worked with Victoria on the protocol to chart breech specialist midwives, clinics and teams in the UK.
The OptiBreech Project 