Shawn is currently funded by an NIHR Advanced Fellowship to explore the feasibility of conducting a large, multi-centre trial of vaginal breech births at term, OptiBreech.

Shawn has worked in all midwifery settings -- home, freestanding and alongside midwifery units and obstetric units. Her PhD research arose out of advocacy work with service users, seeking to improve the care pathway for women with breech-presenting babies and working closely with my obstetric, anaesthetic and neonatal colleagues to do this. It focused on the question: How can clinicians learn to safely deliver breech babies in the current maternity care context, given minimal opportunities to attend breech births?

From 2012-2014, Shawn pioneered the clinical role of Breech Specialist Midwife at James Paget University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, a small unit with 2000 births per year in Norfolk. Approximately 1:20 women who used this service transferred in from other hospitals due to unmet demand elsewhere. 

Out of her research, Shawn developed and evaluated a physiological breech birth training programme that is now delivered to over 2000 health care professionals globally each year through a not-for-profit company, of which she is the Director, Breech Birth Network CIC (breechbirth.org.uk). In addition to at least twenty NHS Trusts and Ambulance Services who use her evidence-based teaching materials in mandatory training, her publications on PBB methods are referenced as key sources in midwifery breech training programmes in Canada and the Netherlands.