Alumni journeys: Sara Kenyon

I loved my training from the start and we were lucky to have Dora Henschel as our tutor who was an incredibly inspirational, compassionate, thoughtful and caring. I worked between Kings and Dulwich Hospital (which in those days did about 1,500 births) and became a staff midwife at Dulwich.

I then went on to be a sister in the Ultrasound Department in 1983. At that time the fetal medicine unit was headed by Professor Stuart Campbell and was of international renown (now Harris-Birthright Research Centre for Fetal Medicine), where other leading fetal medicine practitioners such as Kypros Nicolaides, Christoph Lees and Charles Rodeck trained and worked. I pioneered midwives scanning, was involved in the start of the Basic Ultrasound Course at Kings, as well as the Advanced one, and the beginnings of the charity Antenatal Results and Choices, which started in London in the late 1980s.

We then re-located as a family to Nottingham and I got a job as the Research Midwife on the ORACLE trial with Professor David Taylor at Leicester. I ended up working at Leicester for the next 16 years and went on to become a co-applicant for the ORACLE trial and lead the ORACLE Children Study which followed the UK Children up at seven years of age. I did a Masters in Applied Health Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester over four years in 2001- juggling a busy job and two small children. I lead the NICE Intrapartum Care Guideline published in 2007. I was awarded my PhD in 2009 from Leicester University supervised by Mary Dixon Woods on the basis of my publications.

I moved to the University of Birmingham in January 2009, and became Professor of Evidence Based Maternity Care in August 2017. I am currently leading working on the maternity theme of the NIHR Applied Health Collaboration (ARC) in the West Midlands.  I have co-developed the maternity triage system called BSOTS, which is increasingly being implemented in UK maternity units. I am the Chief Investigator for the HTA funded High or Low Dose Syntocinon Trial (HOLDS) and iHOLDS trials. These are multicentre, pragmatic, randomised, double blind controlled trials which will recruit 3900 women from 30 Maternity units to evaluate the effect on caesarean section rate of high dose regimen versus standard dose regimen oxytocin for nulliparous women at term (37-42 weeks gestation) when it is used for delay and induction of labour.

I am a member of the 'MBRRACE-UK' collaboration appointed by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) to continue the national programme of work investigating maternal deaths, stillbirths and infant deaths, including the Confidential Enquiry into Maternal Deaths (CEMD). I co-chair the perinatal confidential enquiries with Professor Draper (Leicester). I am also part of the collaboration developing and implementing the Perinatal Mortality Review Tool to standardise review of perinatal death. I am a passionate NIHR Advocate for career development in Midwifery and is Deputy Chair of the HEE/NIHR Integrated Clinical Academic (ICA) Programme Pre-doctoral Clinical Academic Fellowship Scheme Panel. I am a Fellow of the Royal College of Midwives.

The Year of the Midwife means a lot to me as it is an opportunity to celebrate the midwife and all the roles that are possible in both practice and academia. I didn’t have a career like this planned when I started out and have been lucky to meet some fantastic people along the way. I hope that midwives in roles like mine demonstrate that there are many possibilities out there and what’s important is to find a role that you happy in.