BU Research Blog

Dr Daisy Wiggins was successful in her bid for NIHR Undergraduate Internship funding. This is a small aspect of a much larger body of work being done in collaboration with University Hospitals Dorset (UHD) with Minesh Khushu consultant Neonatologist at UHD, Dr Steve Trenoweth and Michael Lyne here at BU. Daisy, supervised by Prof Vanora Hundley and Steve T. will herself be supervising a BU undergraduate student who has just successfully interviewed. The intern will be looking at the literature available on women and families involved in care proceeding particularly looking at current support, interventions and help offered during pregnancy or at the removal of their baby. 

As of 2022, 86.9% of women attending court for care proceedings, had cases whereby the child/ren were less than 11 months old and a large majority were babies (Alrouh et al. 2022). The evidence is clear on how this has a significant impact on the newborn in the immediate postnatal period, but also in terms of future development. Furthermore the wider impact on the woman, families and care systems is well documented, what isn’t  however is currently available support and services for these children, women and families.  The intern will look at currently literature to contribute to a scoping review before supporting PPI with women who have experience of this to understand what provisions of care and interventions are needed.

It is hoped that the output from this internship will be a stepping stone into a larger PhD project that identifies pertinent factors (personal, social/ cultural, legal and health) to improve our understanding of the needs of women who are at risk of repeated care proceedings following birth.

With future aspirations of developing and testing a service level approach / pathway to meet the needs of pregnant women involved in care proceedings (and particularly those who are subject to repeat proceedings).

Check out BU_research and BU_midwifery for details of the focus groups to please share