Ethel BurnsDr Ethel Burns is a Senior Lecturer in Midwifery at Oxford Brookes University.

Ethel’s teaching interests are focused primarily on facilitating students to make explicit links between clinical practice and the best available evidence to underpin it and to stimulate appetite to engage with research projects. Involvement in generating evidence coupled with the ability to interpret and communicate it sensitively and effectively when negotiating care provision with individual women is a quintessential clinical and academic skill. Ethel retains a clinical role, which keeps her earthed, curious and in touch with the contextual realities of being a midwife in the UK. She also has clinical, educational and strategic level experience working in a range of high, middle and low-income countries; an interest heightened by the global review of midwifery – published in the Lancet Series on Midwifery and running a module on global perspectives on midwifery.

She cares passionately about enhancing women’s health and wellbeing during pregnancy and beyond. She is particularly interested in care during labour and birth and a primary focus for her research is around water immersion during labour and waterbirth.

She leads the BSc and MSc dissertation modules and is the subject coordinator for the Postgraduate, Pre-registration midwifery course. MSc students are routinely supported to undertake primary research for their dissertation projects.

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