About
Carol is a medical sociologist in the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health, University of Liverpool and the School of Nursing & Midwifery, University of Central Lancashire. She holds an honorary contract with Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust. She leads applied qualitative and mixed-methods research in maternity care. Her main areas of research encompass choice and birth mode, stillbirth and bereavement care, and qualitative sub-studies of intrapartum clinical trials.
Carol started her career in operational research management roles in the NHS. Pre-NIHR she was awarded an NHS Doctoral Fellowship to complete her PhD, the first longitudinal study of choice and birth mode in the UK. Between 2016-2021, Carol worked with the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a Technical Advisor leading three qualitative evidence syntheses for the 2018 WHO recommendations on non-clinical interventions to reduce unnecessary caesarean section and the 2023 WHO Technical Brief: Research gaps and needs to optimize the use of assisted vaginal birth. Carol also supervised the qualitative sub-study of the WOMAN Trial (DARCI) in the UK and the MOLI Trial in India (Q-MOLI). From June 2020 to July 2021 Carol led the NHS component of the UKRI-ESRC funded ASPIRE-COVID-19 study of safe and personalised maternity and neonatal care during the pandemic. Carol briefly returned to an NHS operational research management role from September 2021 to March 2023. During that time, she led the development of Wirral University Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s Research and Innovation Strategy 2021-26 engaging with >250 staff, patients, the Integrated Care System, NIHR and Higher Education partners.
Carol has a cross-institutional NHS and global health research portfolio that includes a co-investigator role in the MRC Applied Global Health Research Programme C-Safe: Improving maternal and perinatal outcomes through safe and appropriate caesarean sections in low- and middle-income countries. She is a member of the International Advisory Group for the Horizon 2020 funded programme QUALI-DEC: Reducing unnecessary caesarean section through QUALIty DECision-making by women and providers in low- and middle-income countries and sits on the qualitative independent data monitoring group for the NIHR funded Evaluation of Maternity Investigations and Review Tools: Process Evaluation (MATREP).