Dr Laura Goodfellow Receives Award for Work on Birth Outcomes
Dr Laura Goodfellow of the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health received an award for her presentation at the recent annual Clinical Academics in training conference, organised by the Academy of Medical Sciences.
Dr Goodfellow’s award was given in recognition of her work on the first population-based study into maternal and neonatal outcomes after Preterm Prelabour Rupture of Membranes (PPROM) under 23 weeks’ gestation.
This study was conducted with the help of the patient support and advocacy group, Little Heartbeats, and the UK Obstetric Surveillance System (UKOSS) based at the University of Oxford.
On receiving the award, Dr Goodfellow said, “It was an incredibly uplifting and empowering experience to present this work to an engaged lecture theatre full of clinical academics from a diverse range of specialities.
“This is an important, but niche, topic and to have the audience appreciating the gravity of this work is fabulous. Afterwards I had haematology lecturers discussing the statistical analysis with me, and intensive care professors advising upon the pathologies identified. This project has so far involved understanding outcomes of pregnancies affected by early PPROM, and communicating these to clinicians and patients. The next stage is to work out how to improve pregnancy outcomes. This award couldn’t have come at a better time to spur on this next stage of work.”
The Academy of Medical Sciences is a charity that aims to create an open and progressive research sector to improve the health of people everywhere. They support the development of clinical academics, and as part of this hold an annual clinical academics in training conference.
Clinical academics in training from all medical specialities and from across the UK are eligible to submit abstracts of their work. The top 8 submitted abstracts, 4 from post-doctoral researchers and 4 from pre-doctoral researchers were selected for oral presentation, with over 40 selected for poster presentation. Dr Goodfellow won the post-doctoral oral presentation prize.
The prize was presented by Professor Edwin Chilvers, University of Cambridge on Wednesday 7 June 2023 at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.
More information about the conference, including a recording of the presentation is available here https://acmedsci.ac.uk/grants-and-schemes/events/catac