Carol Mashhadi

Carol has been a midwife since 1989 with her previous midwifery experience encompassed working in the maternity units in Ormskirk, Southport, Preston and Shyira, Rwanda. Her involvement with ALSO, which is a world and countrywide charity supporting the development of Obstetric clinical skills, has provided her with opportunities to collaborate both nationally and internationally around the subject area of obstetric emergency management.

Despite being an expert in the management of obstetric emergencies, Carol also has a strong focus in the area of promoting normal midwifery. As part of a team who successfully established the midwifery led unit in Southport, she demonstrated how focussing on normal midwifery can produce remarkable results, achieving birth without intervention.

Carol has a keen interest in both inter-professional learning and clinical simulation and has previously had responsibility for the development of skills provision within midwifery programmes, which led to the development of an interactive provision within the pre-registration midwifery programme and CPD provision. These skills have created collaboration between other health programmes including ODP and paramedics. She is the current Lead Midwife for Education for the BSc undergraduate programmes and academic lead for the midwifery and neonatal education team. Carol leads the PW4003 examination of the newborn module included on the MSc midwifery programme and supports dissertation supervision.

Carol was a full time clinical midwife for 15 years prior to entering into academia and continues to maintain some clinical elements during her educational career particularly in respect of examination of the newborn, which she feels is important for her own development and demonstrates currency and competency to those she teaches. As a midwife, she worked in all aspects of midwifery practice and was part of a number of innovations with caseload midwifery and the establishment of a midwifery led unit before being seconded into education in 2004. Carol became a full-time educator in 2006 and during the last 14 years have developed her skills and knowledge through changing roles and responsibilities. In 2010, she became the CPD lead for midwifery which at that time had only 1 module. By 2011 she had developed the midwifery portfolio with the introduction of an MSc and BSc International Midwifery Studies and BSc Clinical and Professional Midwifery Practice programme.

As programme lead for the 3 pathways she learnt the importance of programme leadership, curriculum development including the need to meet the QAA and professional standards. Successful recruited to all the programmes including several international students from Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Germany and the Philippines who successfully accessed the programmes fully online. In 2017 she was appointed to the Lead Midwife for Education role at UCLan, which is a strategic role and has a significant element of leadership and quality assurance within it. One of the main features is maintaining professional standards and leading the development of the new curriculum mapped against the recently approved midwifery standards. The role of lead midwife for education (LME) and curriculum design is crucial to the success of the midwifery programmes. The role is integral to development, delivery and management of midwifery education programmes including maintenance of high standards of education. One key characteristic of the role is the close relationship with the NMC and the essential element of conferring student midwives’ good health and character at the end of their training, before they enter the profession.