Agnes Phelan

Agnes Phelan qualified as a Registered General Nurse, Registered Midwife and Registered Nurse Tutor. She has Higher Diploma in Midwifery, MComm in Government and Policy. She is currently a Doctorate Social Science candidate. Past clinical experience involved working in a number of maternity units in London with a variety of models of midwifery care. Agnes has been involved with midwifery education mainly in a teaching and curriculum development roles for a number of years initially with the Health Service Executive to teach and coordinate programmes for the Higher Diploma in Midwifery and continuing practice development education programmes for midwives. Agnes developed the BSc Midwifery (Hons) Undergraduate curriculum in 2006 and has been involved with subsequent curriculum reviews of this programme. She is a module leader for a number of modules at a number of levels and teaches on nursing and midwifery modules on maternal and infant health, pregnancy, childbirth, postnatal care and care of the newborn. She supervises students’ research projects at undergraduate, postgraduate, masters level. Her research interests are: provision of midwifery models of care for the provision of maternity care and the wellbeing of midwives in their working environment.

Research carried out by me has been to Masters Level in relation to Culture as a Public Policy Variable a National Breastfeeding Policy for Ireland in 2003. This was historical research and involved the factors that affected current breastfeeding rates in Ireland which remain very low despite health promotion efforts. The conclusion of this research was that culture is a complex concept affected by the past and malleable by different interrelated contemporary contexts and therefore needs to be seriously considered when formulating public policy. More recently (2008) I have been involved with a small team in a review of the provision of breastfeeding education on behalf of the Health Service Executive. This was quantitative research and included a review of the content and provision of breastfeeding education for pre-service and in-service health care workers. Doctorate of Social Sciences commenced in September 2013. Qualitative research, Thematic analysis.