Strengthening student midwives’ capability to optimise labour and birth physiology: An international collaboration

In this talk, Dr Claire Feeley is joined by Katja Refai, midwife and educator, from Charité University of Berlin. Together, we will be exploring how to strengthen student midwives’ capability to optimise labour and birth physiology.

Claire Feeley will present ‘From practice to research, to education, to collaboration: The ‘PhysBirth’ Study’ providing an overview of this study, findings to date and how this study has expanded within the UK and now in Germany. This study was the first of its kind to focus on student midwives’ personally facilitated births to identify patterns and their exposure to midwifery-led optimisation processes, techniques and practices to help understand what is happening on the ground in clinical practice. Collectively, the study aims to help support student midwives to develop the necessary skills to optimise labour and birth physiology that is the hallmark of safe, effective care – to improve the experiences and outcomes of women and birthing people.

Katja Refai will share insights as the Principal Investigator of ‘PhysBirth-Germany’ where she has taken the study and adapted it to the German context. She will present ‘Exploring Students’ Experiences of Physiological Birth in Clinical Placements: The MEdIP Project in Germany’. Katja will share insights of how she has adapted, translated and extended the MORA birth documentation for the German education context, implemented in December 2025, with analysis planned after 18 months. Two other German universities are already using the documentation, creating opportunities for future cross-site comparisons. Furthermore, Katja will explore plans to adapt the mixed-methods survey for the German context and implementation in Wintersemester.

Please note this will be recorded and sent out after the event - so do sign up if you just wish to receive the recording.

About Claire Feeley

Dr Claire Feeley is a Senior Lecturer of Midwifery at King’s College London with an emphasis on research within her role. As an experienced clinical midwife, educator and researcher, Claire specialises in physiological birth across the risk spectrum, water immersion, human rights framework, midwifery practice, skill and competence - all within a sociocultural-political lens. Claire’s personal research has included freebirthing, midwives supporting out of guidelines physiological birth care with numerous collaborations in a wider range of topic areas i.e. assisted vaginal birth, experiences of pharmacological/non-pharmacological pain relief methods, water immersion outcomes and experiences, parents' psychosocial needs during neonatal unit care, patient and public involvement during innovation and continuity of care implementation. Central to all of Claire’s work – education, research and practice is the improvement of maternity service delivery to meet the needs of all those within our care.

About Katja Refai

Katja Refai is a midwife and midwifery educator based in Berlin, Germany. She qualified as a midwife in Germany in 2005 and spent the following ten years working in different NHS Trusts in the United Kingdom, where she gained broad experience across a variety of maternity care settings. After returning to Germany, she joined Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin as a clinical midwife in 2015. She holds a Master of Midwifery from the University of Sheffield and completed a Master’s degree in Medical Education in 2020. In 2019, she began combining clinical practice with part-time teaching in midwifery education.

From 2020 onwards, she was closely involved in developing the new university-based midwifery degree programme at Charité, while continuing to teach in the former midwifery school. Between 2021 and 2023, she helped manage the transition between both programmes. Her main interests include curriculum development, clinical skills education, practice-based learning, and innovative teaching formats. Current projects include “Students Learning from Pregnant Women” and the MEdIP project, which introduced a new system for documenting student-attended births at Charité in 2025.

About Midwifery and Maternity Health Research Group

The Midwifery & Maternal Health Research Group is developing a programme of high-quality research to foster improvements to the delivery, outcomes and experiences of maternity care services. Our research is underpinned by the Lancet’s Midwifery framework for quality maternal and newborn care (QMNC). The QMNC is based on a definition of midwifery which encompasses skills, attitudes and behaviours, rather than specific professional roles. Therefore, while rooted in midwifery practice, our work goes beyond professional boundaries to centre childbearing women, people and their families.

Staff work within the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care, in close collaboration with the Life Course Sciences Women & Children’s Health Department. We are also forging research networks and collaborations with the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience and Philosophy & Medicine. Additionally, the team bring their existing wider networks, service-user and clinician partnerships and collaborations that will develop and enhance the research profile.

We bring together our diverse but inter-related fields of interest. These have previously included modifiable risk factors for stillbirth, maternity care experiences for those who have experienced childhood sexual abuse, midwifery practices in facilitating complex physiological birth and improving maternity care for women with pre-existing medical conditions. Together, our work will continue to consider the outcomes and experiences of those receiving care, and those delivering care to address some of the key issues facing maternity services today - https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/midwifery-maternal-health.