With a background in animal behaviour, my current work in the field of human infant feeding and maternal and child health is known internationally. Projects have aimed to understand and improve breastfeeding practices, the impact of tongue-tie for breastfeeding women, evaluate breastfeeding peer support interventions, and family-centred care in neonatal units. Internationally recognised tools to improve assessment of breastfeeding difficulties associated with tongue-tie for health professional use in the care of mothers and infants include: The Bristol Breastfeeding Assessment Tool (BBAT), Bristol Tongue Assessment Tool (BTAT) and TABBY (tongue-tie and breastfed babies) tool. These tools are used in 20 countries and translated into 13 languages for clinical use.

Neonatal care projects have produced the ‘Train-to-Home’ (TTH) parent materials and a staff training package to implement family-centred discharge planning for infants in neonatal care units (available on the SW Neonatal Network website: www.swneonatalnetwork.co.uk/train-to-home.) The Coolcuddle studies are exploring the effects of parents cuddling their babies undergoing cooling therapy (for hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy (HIE)) and embedding the CoolCuddle intervention into neonatal intensive care units.

Alongside the infant health work, I have provided qualitative methodology expertise as a team science co-applicant for 19 NIHR funded projects. In Child Health these include children’s respiratory infections, child injury prevention work, infant sleep, childhood diabetes and sexual health of young people. Maternal Health studies have focussed on depression in pregnancy, social distancing in the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine hesitancy in pregnancy.
From 2008 - 2018, I also led the Bristol site of the NIHR Research Design Service -SW.