Heather Welford
Heather has been an NCT breastfeeding counsellor and tutor training other breastfeeding counsellors and healthcare professionals for many years.
As a journalist and writer, she’s written several books and many articles about feeding babies, and has a strong interest in research related to this field. She gained an MSc (as a very mature student!), looking closely at early infant relationships. She retired last year and has three adult children, and three young grandchildren. She lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.
She will be joining us to talk about all aspects of feeding infants and children on Monday 8th May at 9pm.
Heather Trickey
Heather works as a Research Associate for DECIPHer – the Centre for the Development and Evaluation of Complex Interventions for Public Health Improvement – at Cardiff University, where she is studying for a PhD in infant feeding policy. She also works as a Research Manager for NCT charity. She is a qualified NCT breastfeeding counsellor. She says: ‘Health and social policy evaluation has the consistent theme throughout working life. I’ve hopped the fence between academic research departments and research commissioning organisations; I’ve worked for research centres, the civil service and in the third sector. I have a background in epidemiology and in social policy and I am an experienced qualitative researcher. I have a particular interest in participative approaches to evaluation.
I’ve tended to explore policy questions: What sorts of policies or interventions are implemented and why? Why do some policies, in some places, appear to ‘work’ whilst others fail? Where and how could intervention be improved? I’m very interested in the human experience of policy implementation. Between 2008 and 2011 I led a participative policy-research review of NCT Charity’s infant feeding policy, leading to changes in services and policy. My current areas of research interest are infant feeding policy, breastfeeding peer support and community-based public health interventions.’
You can read some thinking from her research here: https://www.midirs.org/changing-conversation-infant-feeding/ Heather will be with us at 9pm on Tuesday 2nd May to discuss how we can take a new societal view on supporting breastfeeding.
Helen Ball
Helen Ball is the Director of the Parent-Infant Sleep Lab at the University of Durham. Her research encompasses attitudes and practices regarding the sleep of infants, young children and their parents, sleep developments and the tensions between cultural sleep preferences and biological sleep needs.
She pioneers the translation of academic research on infant sleep into evidence for use by parents and healthcare staff via ISIS — the Infant Sleep Information Source website.
She will be with us at 9pm on Tuesday 18th April 2017, to answer all our questions about sleep and to let us know what research can and can’t yet tell us about the most pressing matter in many parents’ minds.
