Premier Session

Midwifery and Quality Care: The story of the Lancet series on midwifery
Friday, May 16, 8:30 - 9:30 AM

This session will present the background to the
development of the forthcoming Lancet
Series on Midwifery. It will examine the challenges of identifying
and synthesizing the evidence base, and will present preliminary findings that
clarify the key role of midwifery in providing quality care in low-, middle-
and high-income settings. Please note that this paper will
present pre-publication material and you are kindly requested not to
disseminate.

About Mary Renfrew





Mary Renfrew is a health researcher with a clinical
background in midwifery and nursing. She is currently the Director of the Mother and Infant Research Unit at the School of Nursing and Midwifery and the Director of Applied Health Research at the College of Medicine, Dentistry, and Nursing at the University of Dundee, Scotland.


She has conducted research in policy and
practice in maternity care and in infant feeding for over 30 years, and has
worked in the universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, Leeds, York, and Dundee in the
UK and in Alberta, Canada. In 1996 Mary founded the multidisciplinary Mother
and Infant Research Unit (MIRU) in the University of Leeds, and she has led it
since, recently re-establishing it following her move to Dundee in 2012. MIRU's research has been used to inform and
shape policy and practice in maternity care and infant feeding nationally and
internationally; it has had a longstanding focus on ways of reducing
inequalities in health, and on engagement of women and practitioners in the
design and conduct of research. Mary has presented to audiences in 15
countries, has led a number of seminal systematic reviews, and in addition to
over 120 academic journal publications, she has written widely about maternity
care and infant feeding, and is co-author and editor of books for academic, professional
and lay audiences, including "A guide to effective care in pregnancy and
childbirth" (with Murray Enkin, Marc Keirse, and Jim Neilson), and "Bestfeeding"
(with Chloe Fisher and Suzanne Arms).


She was appointed an inaugural Senior
Investigator with the UK National Institute for Health Research, has been Chair
of the WHO Strategic Committee for Maternal and Newborn Health, and was a
founding co-editor of the Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Group. She is a member
of the ICM Research Standing Committee and the WHO working group on quality of
care in midwifery, and is currently leading a global alliance to write a
Special Series on Midwifery for the Lancet, funded by the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation.