Pioneering British midwife retires

04 July 2012

One of Britain's most influential midwives who helped re-write international rules on how to treat new mums injured in childbirth has retired.

Veteran midwife and celebrated lecturer at the University of Staffordshire Christine Kettle grew up in Newcastle but was written off by her headmaster as having low academic expectations.

But as we all know there is nothing better than to prove a mean teacher wrong - and the mother-of-two went on to become the first North Staffordshire midwife to be made a professor of women's health – and the only one of that rank in Britain to continue to spend half her week treating patients.

In addition to this Christine has delivered thousand of babies and brought relief to countless mothers who had difficult births.

Christine, age 62, yesterday retired as the longest-serving midwife at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire.

Although she has packed away her scrubs she is continuing her academic work and later this week three specialist midwives will travel from Brazil to see her perineal repair techniques which are acclaimed throughout the world.

Christine has worked at the same hospital since she enrolled as a student nurse in 1968 and went on to become a midwife four years later.

Christine, who also teaches at Staffordshire University, made her international reputation with a seven-year PhD research project involving 1,542 new North Staffordshire mothers which ran until 2002. The programme cost just £60,000, including paying a research assistant, and she stayed on call 24-hours-a-day for 19 months to assess women wanting to take part.

That compares to the £500,000 research related income her latest project has netted her hospital – a scale unprecedented for midwife-led work.

Christine told local press how the maternity services were have changed over the years and that they are "unrecognisable from more than 40 years ago."

Christine, who has two daughters and three grandchildren, said her ambition to become a midwife was fired by working on a gynaecology ward and she still recalls the first birth she observed.

"The baby looked so purple and strange that I was fascinated," she told the The Sentinel.

"I may have delivered very many babies, yet every single time it has the same feeling of being special, that it is a tiny miracle."

Christine has seen the time women spend in hospital after birth reduced from five days to six hours and the ratio of care increase to one to one.

Still living in Newcastle, she said: "I have seen the health of babies improve dramatically over the years with far less prematurity and low birth weight."

Before becoming a professor in 2005, Christine spent years as a night sister on the GP-led midwifery unit and then co-ordinator in the centre's main labour suite.

She developed her interest in perineal repair early in her career when she remembers "watching helplessly as women walked around in severe pain from giving birth."

Decades later she would become the first midwife to write guidelines on the subject for the National Institute of Clinical Excellence.