Professor Mary Renfrew, Visiting Fellow at UTS

Mary Renfrew, Professor of Mother and Infant Health and Associate Dean Research at the University of Dundee, Scotland, came to UTS as a visiting fellow in August 2015.

Renfrew’s clinical background is in midwifery, and she has been a health researcher for around 30 years. Renfrew also runs a multidisciplinary group that’s looking at ways of improving health and care for women, babies and families. She has a particular interest in reducing the impact of inequality, so her team works frequently with women from vulnerable groups.

Renfrew also runs a national collaborating centre in Scotland for evidence-based sustainable change across health and social care. The centre comprises a large collaboration of universities, health boards, advocacy groups and government, among others.

 

“In a sense, these two things come very closely together for me, because my own personal interest is in improving health and care for women and babies at scale, and the centre that I’m running is looking at this more generally across health care.”

Renfrew’s interests are similar to those of UTS Professor Caroline Homer, Associate Dean (International and Development) and Professor of Midwifery in the Faculty of Health at UTS. Renfrew and Homer have been working together for many years, and have been collaborating closely on producing the Lancet series on midwifery – the leading health and medical journal.

“It was a great joy to work with Caroline on that series, so it was an obvious next step to build on that collaboration, and come over and spend some time with her group. Her group’s interests really overlap with the interests of my maternity group, particularly in the areas of working with women, babies and families from vulnerable groups – people from low-income backgrounds or teenagers or women with particular problems, babies in neonatal units. These people are vulnerable and are likely to have the worst outcomes. It’s really important that we work out how to provide them with the best care.”

Not only do Renfrew and Homer’s groups share such interests, but there’s work at UTS around improvement and evidence-based improvement for health systems, which links in with an another KTP visiting fellow, Renfrew’s colleague from Dundee, Professor Thilo Kroll. Kroll visited UTS last year, and has been working on a program with Associate Professor Roger Dunston.

“Those interests align very nicely in relation to the work I’m doing. I’m leading a Scotland-wide collaboration on the evidence base for large-scale sustainable change, which is a really nice alignment with Roger’s interests as well.”

“It brings together nicely how we might improve health and care at scale. There are lots of very good synergies, and lots of partnerships.”  

The Lancet series on midwifery, for example, has been a really important series for decision-makers globally, and is currently being taken up by WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA and other major agencies. Indeed, some of the recommendations from the Lancet series are currently being rolled out, demonstrating evidence-based improvement at scale.

Renfrew and Homer have also discovered compatible interests among some of their colleagues.

“We’re also talking about the possibility of shared PhD studentships. It’s difficult to get joint grants across countries. But even if we don’t do that, I think there’s potential for collaboration, joint publications, and possibly getting grants.”

While health care systems may be different, the challenges remain the same. And researchers face the same problems when determining how to move from evidence into policy, and from policy into practice.

“You find that whatever country you’re in, those are what people call ‘wicked’ problems – the ones that are really, really hard to solve. And they’re hard to solve for everybody. So having those cross-connected conversations and different perspectives on them, you can learn from each other.”

“In my field, working internationally is really important, and for years I’ve been working with people all over the world. In the Lancet series in midwifery, for example, we have 35 collaborators in 20 countries on five continents. It’s a big global alliance, working with WHO, the International Confederation of Midwives, UNICEF and so on. Those international alliances – with the big policy agencies and big public health agencies, but also with other universities – are really important.”

“The opportunity to actually spend time thinking about the collaboration rather than thinking about the project is what’s different here, and that’s important.”