Catherine Adkins

• Lead the Antenatal Clinic at the West Suffolk Hospital, ensuring safe, high quality, evidence based care for all women in the antenatal period.
• Line manage a team of midwives, care assistants, phlebotomists, and admin staff.
• Liaise and network with a number of other departments ensuring excellent communication between areas and joined-up working.
• Lead and attend a variety of multidisciplinary team meetings
• Update all guidelines relevant to antenatal care and complete gap analyses as required.
• Investigate all incidents relevant to Antenatal Clinic
• Responsibility for the staff duty rota, ensuring Antenatal Clinic has the appropriate staff and skill mix
• Complete audits to ensure high quality care.
• Regularly present at meetings both to other health professionals and to pregnant women.
• Established and now oversee the running of a number of specialist antenatal clinics, and lead on many specialist initiatives within antenatal care such as the fetal growth surveillance programme and the transport working party aimed at reducing health inequalities.

As a band 6 Antenatal Clinic midwife I liaised with the wider maternity team and multidisciplinary team to create comprehensive care packages for pregnant women, cooperating within multidisciplinary team settings for improved patient outcomes.

Key responsibilities included:

• Act as an advocate for women providing care which is women-centred, evidence-based, equitable and appropriate to individual need and choice
• Work in collaboration with the safeguarding midwife and where appropriate take action in accordance with local safeguarding policies
• Support the consultant obstetric clinic, providing a full antenatal check when appropriate and offering women support from a midwifery perspespective
• Provide the antenatal midwifery lead on Diabetes in Pregnancy, contributing to the model of delivering multidisciplinary care
• Organise and chair multi-disciplinary meetings, thus strengthening working relationships between agencies in order to improve quality of care and optimise evidence-based practice
• Support community public health initiatives to help reduce health inequalities, such as smoking cessation and healthy eating
• Provide learning opportunities and supervise midwifery students during their placement in Antenatal Clinic; also help orientate new members of staff

• Assisted in preparing and implementing birth plans.
• Demonstrated techniques for comfort measures like massage or breathing exercises.
• Provided emotional support for families through pregnancy, labour, birth and early postnatal period.
• Encouraged bonding between parents and the newborn baby.