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Professor Marian Knight (Medicine 1986) is continuing to strive to improve outcomes and reduce inequalities in maternal health after receiving a MBE in the King’s New Year Honours list.

Marian, Professor of Maternal and Child Population Health at the University of Oxford, was honoured for services to maternal and public health.

Her work demonstrating inequalities in maternal mortality has led to a number of actions to improve care for pregnant women from ethnic minority groups. She also led the national study of women admitted with Covid-19 in pregnancy, seeking to ensure pregnant women received an equitable standard of care to the non-pregnant population.

“I’m passionate about highlighting inequalities and making sure that we are addressing disparities,” she says.

“And there are huge disparities, particularly between Black women and White women in the UK, in terms of their outcomes.

“A new project we’re working on to try to improve this is developing a better way of recognising when women are becoming more ill, but before they’re severely ill. We will be able to escalate their care earlier, to prevent them from getting very sick or dying, and ensure this works effectively for women of all ethnic backgrounds.

“Because of advances in the digital space, heart rates, breathing rates and temperatures can all be recorded electronically, so we can pick up on when things are changing much earlier than using manual systems.

“Hopefully, using this ‘early warning system’, we will be able to prevent deaths. The system will help us act very early to identify women and treat them.”

Marian is also now Programme Director for a Research Funding Programme, run by the National Institute for Health Research.

“Now, I have the responsibility for giving other people money to do good research, which is fantastic,” she adds.

“As a researcher myself, this move towards enabling excellent research ideas that make a difference to patients is a wonderful development in my career.

“We’ve identified that nurses and midwives are underrepresented as researchers - particularly lead researchers. We’ve developed a funding call that is specifically for research led by nurses and midwives which will enable more research careers in underrepresented groups.”