One of the fastest ways to improve maternity care is also the simplest: notice what doesn’t sit right, then ask a better question. We sit down with midwife and academic Nicole Haynesworth to trace how a career built across regional New South Wales, a high acuity UK hospital, and university teaching turns curiosity into real change for women, babies, and the clinicians learning the craft.
We talk about what Nicole brought back from the UK, including a different approach to post-caesarean care that keeps mother and baby together, and how asking “why are we doing it this way?” can shift practice when you involve the right stakeholders. From there, we move into midwifery education, continuity of care, and what Nicole’s PhD reveals about students learning best when they feel safe, trusted, and connected to the woman’s experience, rather than just being assessed on tasks. Along the way, we unpack practical teaching tools such as shared goal-setting, reflective practice, and making the “hidden” skills of advocacy, autonomy, and accountability explicit.
We also look ahead to program improvement in Graduate Entry midwifery, supporting clinicians returning to practice, and the research questions still driving Nicole, including synthetic oxytocin policies and induction, epidural-related fever pathways, and gestational diabetes. If you care about evidence-based midwifery, continuity of care, and better feedback loops between women and the system, you’ll get plenty to take back to your own practice. Subscribe for more conversations like this, share the episode with a colleague, and leave a review with the one question you think maternity care should be asking next.
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