Meet the Cherish Team
We are a research team made up of service-users, maternity improvement campaigners, midwives, obstetricians, statistician and researchers embarking on the preparatory work needed to test a personalised birth bundle, co-designed to improve outcomes for women and birthing people who are aiming for a spontaneous labour and birth.
Michelle Quashie
Service user co-investigator and maternity improvement campaigner.
Michelle has spent the past 10 years working to improve maternity care and has founded as well as been involved in several campaigns. Her work is inspired by lived experiences of individuals accessing maternity care and the births of her own four children. She has a particular interest in Human Rights in Childbirth, and informed decision-making to ensure a personalised approach to maternity care and she believes care can only be determined as safe by those receiving care. Michelle is the founder of The Women's Voices Conference, a platform designed for Women to share their maternity experience, held at King’s College London in 2016 and was the first service user-led conference to be hosted at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology in 2017. She has an extensive track record of influencing transformational change in all areas of maternity, at local, regional and national levels in the UK, for example, in education, recruitment, policy, service provision, public-facing information and training resources, service user engagement, and cultural change. Michelle worked on the UK’s National Maternity Transformation Programme with the Choice and Personalisation workstream and co-produced the national Personalised Care and Support Planning guidance published in March 2021. Her determination and perseverance saw the term ‘Shared Decision Making’ be replaced with ‘Informed Decision Making‘ in national maternity literature and policy guidance.
Jo Dagustun
Public co-investigator and maternity service improvement volunteer.
Jo Dagustun is a mum of four and has been active in the maternity service improvement community since 2008. As a social geographer, Jo holds a birth-related PhD and has worked in public policy for various organisations including HM Treasury.
Jo is a member of her local Maternity Voices Partnership and has been a volunteer with the Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services (AIMS) since 2017, and in that role is a keen member of England’s Maternity Transformation Programme Stakeholder Council. Jo is keen to work collaboratively with others to promote improvements in the maternity services to better support service users, whatever type of birth they choose. This includes calling for physiology-informed maternity services, built upon a solid foundation of relational care, as key to high quality personal, safe and equitable care.
Soo Downe
Joint principal investigator, midwife and maternal health researcher.
Soo spent 15 years working as a clinical and research midwife in Derby. In 2001, she joined UCLan where she is now the Professor of Midwifery Studies. She has undertaken research in a range of maternity care areas, including the organisation of services, bereavement after stillbirth, the safety and use of caesarean section, and the nature of, and cultures around, physiological (normal) birth. She has been a member of the Technical Working Group of the World Health Organization antenatal, intrapartum, postpartum, ultrasound, uterotonics for the prevention of PPH, and optimising caesarean section guidelines. She has published over 180 peer reviewed papers, and several books, She was a co-author in three Lancet Series (Midwifery, Stillbirth, and Optimising Caesearan Section). She is an NIHR Senior Investigator, and is co- lead on the NIHR Cherish study, and a co-investigator on the national GBS3 trial, and the MRC C-Safe study in India and Tanzania.
Bev Hammond
Co-investigator, midwife and maternal health researcher.
Bev qualified as a midwife in 2006 from UCLAN and worked as an Infant feeding co-ordinator for Central Lancashire PCT until 2011. She then moved to Liverpool Community NHS Trust, supporting the development work in both trusts towards UNICEF Baby Friendly Status. In 2013 Bev started her career as a research delivery midwife at East Lancs Hospitals, where she developed and expanded the Gynaecology, Early Pregnancy and Reproductive NIHR portfolio within the Trust. In 2019 Bev became the Team leader for the Women and Childrens research delivery team and later that year won a Greater Manchester Clinical Research Network Special award for outstanding patient care. She is a committee member of the Reproductive Health and Childbirth National Research Champions (RHC-NRC) and one of the lead research delivery midwives in Greater Manchester. Bev is highly passionate about improving outcomes through research and a robust evidence base.
Kate Walker
Co-investigator, obstetrician and maternal health researcher.
A Clinical Professor in Obstetrics at the University of Nottingham, Kate’s clinical interests are in high risk pregnancy, labour ward management and obstetric ultrasound scanning. Her research work is based in Nottingham Clinical Trials Unit (NCTU) and her clinical work is based at Queen's Medical Centre, Nottingham University Hospitals Trust. Kate's research work has focused on randomised controlled trials in obstetrics, neonatology and sexual health. Visit Kate Walker's full profile.
Mandie Scamell
Joint principal investigator, midwife and maternal health researcher.
Dr Mandie Scamell is a medical anthropologist and midwife specialising in risk and the maternity services in the UK. She is a Senior Lecturer in Midwifery at City, University of London. Her main area of work has been on midwifery care in the UK, with particular interests in clinical governance and institutionalised risk management technologies and in the culture and organisation of maternity care. Visit Dr Mandie Scamell's profile page.
Jim Thornton
Co-investigator, obstetrician and maternal health researcher
Qualified at University of Leeds in 1977 and in Kenya from 1979-83. Jim's main research area is clinical trials into the effects of interventions in pregnancy. He retired in 2021 and is currently Emeritus Professor of obstetrics & gynaecology at Nottingham University. He is still working as a locum and searching out scientific fraud.
Gordon Prescott
Co-investigator and statistician.
Dr Gordon Prescott is a medical statistician who joined the Lancashire Clinical Trials Unit at the University of Central Lancashire as Deputy Director and Reader in Medical Statistics. He leads the Health Statistics Team and works on clinical trials and well-designed studies in health and medicine. Visit Gordon Prescott's profile page.
Caitlin Wilson
Research fellow.
Peter Yeh
Honorary consultant advisor, obstetrician and maternal health researcher.
Qualified in Cambridge and trained in London, Cambridge and Oxford, Peter is consultant obstetrician and accredited specialist in fetal maternal medicine at East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust. He serviced in the past as an inaugural secretary of the British Intrapartum Care Society, public governor at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, and steering committee member of iDecide Intrapartum App of NHS England Maternity Transformation Program. His interest concerns the overmedicalisation of pregnancy and childbirth.
Anna Horn
Service user Equity, Diversity and Inclusion advisor
Anna Horn is certified doula and maternal health scholar-activist, currently undertaking a PhD in anthropology of health at the Centre for Maternal and Child Health Research at City, University of London. Anna’s current research investigates Black and South Asian women’s experiences of group antenatal care in the UK through Black feminist and abolitionist perspectives, exploring the group care model’s potential to disrupt colonial legacies embedded within the maternity care system. Furthermore, Anna holds nearly a decade of experience in the maternal, infant and HIV/sexual health fields, ranging from epidemiological surveillance on pregnant women living with HIV to frontline work on a busy National Health Service infant feeding team. Anna has also worked as a maternity service user representative for England’s National Maternity Transformation Programme, co-producing maternal and infant health policies and guidelines.
In addition to her doctoral studies, Anna works part-time as an assistant researcher at the University of Sheffield on the Generation Delta project, aimed at understanding the experiences and outcomes of Black, Asian and minority ethnic women in postgraduate studies among other race equity initiatives in higher education. Visit Anna Horn's profile page.
