First day as a post-doctoral researcher

Today is my first day in my new job as a post-doctoral researcher, at King's College, London.

I came into this job by a rather twisty route. 10 years ago I started working as a doula. I LOVE working as a doula, being able to travel with parents on their journey through pregnancy, being with them offering support during labour, and seeing them settle as a new family, or as a newly enlarged family. However, I was saddened by how many of the lovely parents I worked with hired me because they had previously had a birth which was upsetting, traumatic, or a birth where they didn't feel properly cared for. When I looked to the research to find out what helped parents who had experienced this in their next pregnancy, I couldn't find much good quality evidence. Eventually I decided that if the evidence wasn't there, I would do the research myself.

I spent just over 3 years carrying our research into the choices that women made during pregnancy, birth, and the early postnatal period, when they had previously had a traumatic birth. I followed a number of amazing women from early pregnancy until their babies were a few weeks old, interviewing them at various points. I am hugely grateful to them for giving me their time, and sharing their thoughts, experiences and feelings. During this time I published several articles about choices after a traumatic birth, and was awarded my PhD last year.

Carrying out the research was interesting, terrifying, frustrating, and deeply satisfying, all at once. I decided that I wanted to do more of that, and so began applying for post-doctoral fellowships. It's a tough area to break into, with far more people with brilliant ideas than there is funding for the research. Eventually I was lucky enough to get funding to carry on publishing from my research, and do a little bit of new research, for the next 2 years. This blog is one way that I will spread the findings from my own research, and discuss what all the latest pregnancy, birth and early parenthood research actually means for parents.

(With many thanks to the Economic and Social Research Council for funding me).