Our single site maternity unit at Queen’s Hospital is the largest in north east London (NEL), with capacity to care for all women across Barking and Dagenham, Havering and Redbridge.

It can care for 8,000 women a year in total, so we wanted to share with you the thoughts and priorities of our new Interim Director of Midwifery and Divisional Director of Nursing for Women’s Health Abiola Jinadu, who recently joined our Trust.

Abiola, who has been a midwife and registered nurse for 20 years, has joined us from London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust where she was Deputy Head of Midwifery and Gynaecology Nursing.

Speaking about her new role, Abiola said: “I’m delighted to join the Trust and focus on providing the best possible care for pregnant women across our boroughs. My overall focus is to lead on setting the direction we take across our maternity department whilst working collaboratively with all stakeholders to achieve the best we possibly can within women’s health.

“I’m an advocate for safe high-quality care and I’m looking forward to working with internal and external partners to lead the strategy and operational delivery of local maternity services, as well as the national deliverables for our service users.”

Abiola has held a variety of roles in her career and has worked her way up by continuing to develop her skills.

“I’ve worked for a number of trusts and enjoyed different maternity and nursing roles, but it was while studying for my degree in human biology that I realised how passionate I was about helping people achieve better clinical outcomes.

“When at university I was a Healthcare Assistant, and I really enjoyed the human contact element of the job and seeing how I was making a difference. The impact and compassion I experienced when helping others drove me to my clinical roles.   

Like all trusts, we have been working hard to ensure we are compliant with the recommendations of the Ockenden review and one of these is that the Midwifery Continuity of Carer Model (MCoC) should be suspended until safer staffing levels are in existence.

We’ve written to those affected by this temporary measure and Abiola explained what it means for expecting mothers.

“By pausing the provision of MCoC, we can redeploy several of our community midwives to parts of our three boroughs where there are more ‘at risk’ mothers and babies. The accepted ratio for MCoC across the country is one midwife to 36 women but we cannot run a service where in another borough we have one midwife for 150 women.

“We currently have a 10 per cent midwifery vacancy rate and once we have reached safer staffing levels we intend to resume our MCoC provision. In the meantime, we need to use our resources fairly and where the most benefit will be delivered.”

Abiola wants to work with women, families, and staff to improve their overall experience.

“I’m passionate about engaging with and listening to our Maternity Voices Partnership, as well as other community services, as they will tell us where we can improve, as we look at new initiatives.

“I also know we have fantastic midwives, nurses, support staff and multidisciplinary teams working at our Trust. I want to support them whilst we learn from each other during this journey to be the very best we can be, as we develop leaders at every level.

“My colleagues and I represent our communities and by helping map out the careers of all staff, it will help plan for the next generation of midwives and nurses at our Trust. I want a first-class maternity service where women want to deliver babies with us and an environment where our staff want to work.”