What a year so far!!!
The year started with the Maternity Stream presenting at an international conference in Galway, Ireland. Here we planted the seeds about the Maternity stream at an event that focused mainly on White, English speaking women.

April saw the Maternity Stream develop as an association with over half of trustees and the chair being Maternity Stream refugee volunteers.

Next was the trip to Barcelona and the European funded COST meeting. Here we made valuable links with midwives and other researchers across Europe and within the migrant women working group, identified our research priorities. Our Maternity Stream volunteers are central to this. They will provide training on designing research that considers the service user perspective. In addition, they are reviewing the Babies Born Better European survey to ensure it is user friendly for vulnerable migrant women. There are other outcomes, spreading the message about the Maternity Stream across Europe and beyond and welcoming a German midwife to Leeds to meet our volunteers.

Also in May, we attended the massive Primary Care and Public Health conference at the NEC in Birmingham, talking about the Maternity Stream to hundreds of midwives. Here we developed links with midwives from many cities including London. An exciting consequence of this was being approached to write an article about the Maternity Stream for the BJM.

June saw the ‘Excellence in Maternity Care’ conference in Leeds, where again the volunteers were central, chairing the conference and presenting their experiences. From this Cardiff and Wakefield expressed an interest in holding a conference.

The same week, the Maternity Stream presented at the University of Bradford student midwives society ‘Global midwifery’ conference. Here connections were made with students from other Universities as well as the RCM who are going to facilitate future regional presentations.

Also in June was an international midwifery conference in Grange -over-Sands with an hour and a half symposium composed of 3 papers with the film integrated into these. Here we made links with people in Lancaster, Liverpool and Huddersfield who are Interested in running an ‘Excellence in Maternity Care’ conference in their cities to begin the development of the Maternity Stream. We also made great links with a Professor of Midwifery from Scotland.

Next stop Bournemouth in July and a national midwifery education conference. Again, more interest in the ‘Excellence in Maternity Care’ conference and developing local Maternity Stream groups, this time in Cardiff, Birmingham, Manchester and York. Here, we were also approached by the RCM requesting that we work with them to develop an e learning module about working with asylum seekers and refugees using the model and film.

The conference season has nearly ended but the hard work has only just begun. The next trip is to the next COST meeting to work on our migrant women research. Following this is the ‘Excellence in Maternity Care’ conference in Hull on November 24th. In the meantime, lots more conferences to organise, people to connect and volunteers to nurture. Exciting times!