Professor Gill Thomson

Gill is involved in a wide range of academic and scholarly activities including leading on/supporting research into perinatal health and wellbeing, supervising PhD students, teaches on a number of modules on the MSc in Midwifery programme, member of an NHS ethics committee and is a Research Degrees Tutor at UCLan. Gill is also seconded to the School of Education, Health and Social StudiesDalarna University, Sweden (0.2FTE).

Gill has been involved in a wide number of research/evaluations projects with a cumulative total of ~2 million. These studies focus on different perinatal issues, such as birth trauma and perinatal mental health, peer support models, and delivery of maternity care services. To date she has over 80 peer reviewed publications and is lead author of two Routledge texts. She is a steering group member of SCENE. SCENE is a multi-disciplinary group of international professionals that aims to improve parents’ and infants’ experiences and outcomes of neonatal care. The focus of the SCENE collaboration is to undertake research into how and why parent-infant physical and emotional closeness varies in neonatal units, within and between countries; the short- and long-term effects of closeness and separation on infants, parents and the infant-parent dyad; as well as how to optimise parental and infant health and wellbeing. She is also on the management committee of the COST Gill has a particular specialism in Hermeneutic Phenomenology, and co-factiliates an annual Hermeneutic Phenomenology methodology course and symposium with Professor Susan Crowther (Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand).

Current PhD Supervision:

• Joanne Cull