A midwife by background, from a public health role as Teenage Pregnancy Midwife, Lucy November has made adolescent pregnancy and motherhood the focus of her research, specifically the effect of a close relationship on pregnancy outcomes, both in terms of surviving pregnancy, and thriving as a mother and a woman. 

In England, funded by the Sir Halley Stewart Trust, she used qualitative methods to understand the training and support needs of parent-and-child foster carers, which led to the development of a website www.FosteringHope.org and a strong network of foster carers in the form of a Facebook closed group.

In Sierra Leone, working with grassroots organisation Lifeline Nehemiah Projects (LNP), she was funded by the Wellbeing of Women’s International Midwifery Fellowship to understand the reasons for very high maternal mortality in adolescents in Sierra Leone.  This led to Lucy and Mangenda Kamara from LNP to co-found www.2YoungLives.org a mentoring scheme for pregnant under-18 year olds in 2017.  The scheme is currently the subject of a feasibility cluster-randomised control trial as part of a NIHR Global Health Group, CRIBS; “Simple, scalable innovations & research capacity building to improve maternal health in Sierra Leone” focussed on improving maternal and neonatal health outcomes. To date, 550 girls have been mentored with no maternal deaths and low perinatal deaths. 

Adolescent pregnancy; mentoring; parent-and-child fostering; women and girls' empowerment

Lucy November is a midwife and public health researcher and practitioner with an MSc in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Lucy spent several years living in Sierra Leone working with ex-combatant children and was awarded the Wellbeing of Women's international midwifery fellowship for 2017, to study the causes of adolescent maternal mortality in Freetown, based at Kings College London. This research has led to Lucy piloting 2 Young Lives (www.2YoungLives.org), a mentoring scheme for vulnerable pregnant teenagers there, for which she is now working with a NIHR-funded Global Health Group a pilot cluster RCT.  Lucy has been a practicing foster carer for the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham as  ‘hub home carer’ for the award-winning Mockingbird Family Hub Model team, and was funded by the Sir Halley Stewart Trust to research the training and support needs of parent-and-child foster carers in the UK, from which has developed a range of resources and grown an extensive network of practitioners in this speciality.