Meet the team
Carmel Bagness- RCN Midwifery and Women's Health Adviser
Carmel is a registered nurse, practicing midwife and midwifery educationalist and has considerable expertise in midwifery education, and a background in midwifery and women’s reproductive health ethics.
She worked for Thames Valley University (TVU) as a senior lecturer, where she was involved in the creation of an innovative problem and enquiry based learning curriculum developed for both 78 week and three year midwifery pre registration programmes.
In 2002, she became Lead Midwife for Education at TVU, where she was responsible for a creative team of midwifery lecturers, who progressed midwifery education, scholarship and practice from pre-registration through to post graduate masters programmes.
In 2008, she took on the role of Associate Dean: Quality, Teaching, Learning and Assessment. Then in September 2009, she was seconded to the Department of Health’s Midwifery 2020 programme as Stakeholder Engagement Lead.
Midwifery 2020 was the government’s key programme of work around developing an informed vision of the contribution midwives will make to achieving quality, cost-effective maternity services for women, babies and families across the United Kingdom. During this time she was also on the steering group who produced the Department of Health’s position statement on advanced level nursing.
In 2011 she joined the RCN as Midwifery and Women’s Health Adviser. She has particular interests in reproductive and women’s health ethics, managing change, workforce management and creating effective environments to move forward practice and education for midwives and nurses.
Carmel said...
The Midwifery and Women’s Health Adviser role is about influencing and developing UK-wide health and social care policy and practice, in both midwifery and the full range of women’s health.
I plan to do this by making the best use of the expertise of RCN members and relevant professional, public and client/patient networks.
A key philosophy underpinning this, in particular, when influencing and shaping policy will be around celebrating good practice, while enhancing the need to have shared responsibility for challenging poor practice.
My role includes acting as a resource and conduit for responding to proposals and working groups across the health care provision at both strategic commissioning and operational levels of practice. This includes recognising the need to work within the constraints of contemporary health care provision, while expanding the evidence base to provide high quality cost effective care.
Channelling the knowledge explosion around us to make best use of available evidence, while creating opportunities for professionals to discuss contemporary practice, not just at national level, but also taking account of what we can learn from international health care provision, and how we can contribute to the global health care requirements of the 21st century.
Part of my role will be about supporting and facilitating the work for the Midwifery, Fertility Nursing and the Women’s Health Forums. Initially, this will be about enhancing understanding of how we work together to deliver current projects.
I am looking forward to actively engaging with the membership of the forums and exploring how we maximise influence over the future of health and social care.
Moving and influencing policy across the diverse range of women’s health care and the challenges also faced in maternity services are critical, while the privilege of this role will be the opportunities to work with, and beyond the RCN community.