Britain’s Rainbow Babies

Last week, the Royal College of Midwives announced that parts of Britain are facing a dangerous shortage of midwives; putting mothers and babies across the country at risk.

While this has been a widely recognised feeling amongst those within the profession for some time, the RCM has decided that with a 22% rise in birthrates in England, it was time to shock the government into action and force David Cameron to honour his pre-election pledge to recruit more midwives.

This also coincided with Grazia and SANDS presenting a petition with more than 1,200 signatures to Downing Street. Grazia launched a campaign in co-ordination with SANDS earlier this year following a number of celebrity stillbirths and the publication of The Lancet Stillbirth Series. The aim of the petition was to pressure the government into allocating more funding to research into stillbirth.

11 babies are stillborn in the UK every day. A recent Lancet study placed Britain 33^rd out of 35 high-income nations in terms of stillbirth rates. An easier way of interpreting this information is to think of the UK as ranking 3^rd worst out of 35 high-income nations, with only France and Austria performing worse. It also indicated that that those living in the East Midlands are a third more likely to suffer stillbirths that those living in the South-West.

I have spent the last 3 months investigating the issue of stillbirth rates in the UK as the country is slowly beginning to wake up to this devastating problem.

Please listen to the documentary below as I talk to medical experts, and the Royal College of Midwives to find out how the UK came to be in this position. With interviews including MP Christopher Heaton-Harris, an NHS Trust bereavement midwife, and founder of Count the Kicks charity Sophia Mason, I also investigate what is being done to protect these precious lives.

A Little Birdy Told Me: The other side of the Twitter storm

As a journalism student I expect to be the one finding the story. However Monday 9th May was an interesting 24 hours!

I had become the story, as the media wrongly suspected me of being behind the controversial Twitter account leaking information about a spate of celebrity super injunctions including false allegations of an affair between Jemima Khan and Jeremy Clarkson.

The lead was a non-starter. I had no information or any relationship with this account. However this didn’t stop journalists from numerous outlets including the Evening Standard, The Sun and ITV News attempting to hunt me out, with the Daily Mail even turning up at my parent’s home in Hertfordshire.

Hear my side of the Twitter scandal that rocked the UK’s media in May 2011. Understand the investigative process journalists take when putting a story together and find out what happens when a student journalist gets on the wrong side of a story!