News at the Centre for the History of Medicine
Improving Maternity Care through Women’s Voices: The Women’s Health Strategy Continues a Long Process of Advocacy
Congratulations to Dr Fabiola Creed and Professor Hilary Marland for the publication of their policy paper in the online journal History & Policy.
The article explores the role of women’s voices in shaping maternity care during the twentieth century and you can read it in full here.
Executive Summary
- Effective maternity care has been hampered by limited service provision and inadequate funding throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.
- Pronatalist policies dominated maternity care in the first half of the twentieth century, moving to a growing consumer-led emphasis in the post-war period.
- Historical events – war, the creation of the National Health Service, the hospitalisation and medicalisation of childbirth, and the feminist health movement – led to fundamental changes in maternity services and care.
- After 1900, women became vocal in expressing their aims for improved maternity care, and their ambitions were most effective when they dovetailed with pronatalist goals.
- Following the expansion of mass media, education, and employment for women since the 1960s, both women’s organisations and individuals developed greater confidence in their campaigns for change and in urging policy makers and health services to listen.
- Descriptions of their own experiences from women of all social circumstances and ethnicities can be converted into powerful tools for lobbying policy makers and government and for raising recognition of postnatal mental illness.
Dr Chris Sirrs cited in the latest National State of Patient Safety Report
Wellcome Trust-funded postdoctoral researcher Dr. Chris Sirrs has been cited in the latest ‘National State of Patient Safety Report’, drawn up by the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London. The authors have drawn upon Chris's NHS patient safety timeline in exploring the historical background to patient safety in Britain.
This report regularly informs debates both within the health service and in Parliament.
Insights: Hazardous Health through History
Dr Christopher Sirrs, CHM Research Fellow, will be speaking at the Thackray Museum's prestigious Annual Insights Lecture Series, on the topic Insights: Hazardous Health through History on Saturday, 5 November at 10:00am.
He will be exploring the history of patient safety in the NHS, explaining why a systemic focus on the prevention of harm to patients – despite the ethical injunction for clinicians to ‘do no harm’ – only evolved surprisingly recently in the history of medicine.
Please click here to find out more information and to sign up to attend.