What our students say
Health visitor Ella Ogakwu, 48, explains how the MSc Maternal and Child Health is helping her to achieve her ambition of working more in a strategic role.
I’m a health visitor in south London, working in early intervention, assessment, prevention and health promotion for children and their families.
I originally trained as a lawyer in my native Nigeria and worked as a legal officer in banking. I came to the UK in the early 1990s with my husband, who was pursing his career in obstetrics and gynaecology. After starting our family (we have four children), I retrained first as a nurse then as a midwife here in the Faculty of Health and Social Care Sciences. Eventually I moved into health visiting, which I’ve been doing for over six years now.
I’m currently around halfway through the two year part‐time MSc in Maternal and Child Health: Socio‐Cultural Perspectives. The course is being funded by my employer as part of my continuing professional development. I come into university one day a week and work four days.
This MSc course really appealed to me because of its global coverage – I’m very interested in gaining an international perspective of maternal and child health. I wanted to look at the care of families with young children internationally, compare the epidemiology of disease across the globe and explore different preventative health measures and interventions. I was also interested in looking at the various organisations across the world involved in caring for children and families, and exploring the range of policies around the care of children.
“The course is really helping me prepare for roles in leadership and management”
At this point in my career I’m looking to move towards more strategic roles, so the opportunity to study leadership and management has been really beneficial. I’ve found that what I’m learning in theory seems to work really well in practice ‐ I’ve already taken a few ideas and tried them out in my workplace and within my team, and they appear to be working well.
For example, I’m currently learning about policy development and the impact that new policies can have on different practitioners. A key aspect of that is how people respond to change, and how to encourage them to respond positively. In my workplace we wanted to amalgamate two teams but there was some resistance ‐ some people really wanted to stay where they were. We had an away day and I suggested we do a SWOT analysis, where we all looked at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats around the current situation versus the proposed changes. It became clear to people that the benefits of coming together outweighed those of staying as we were. And so the resistance dissolved.
I’m also working on a research project to identify and implement measures to improve my team’s performance against targets. Health visitors have targets to visit all families with new babies within a specified number of days after the birth. At the moment we’re not quite meeting those targets, so I’m looking at how we can achieve 100% in future. We have quite a large team with various people in different roles, and what I’m exploring is how we might broaden each person’s set of skills so the team can be more flexible and responsive.
The course has really helped my awareness of why things sometimes don’t work and why people resist change. I’ve learned that there are ways of managing change that help people get involved so that they come together and begin to own the process. Even if you’re just doing a pilot project, this is really important.
I’m now feeling really confident about my project, and am looking forward to rolling it out and meeting our targets in future.
“The support is amazing”
The support here is fantastic. At the beginning of the course I had a few doubts about whether I could manage to combine studying and working with raising my family – it seemed like a lot to take on. But thanks to the wonderful support and encouragement I received from my tutors, I decided to stick with it and I’m so glad I did. I have a routine now, it’s all falling into place. I feel very comfortable here. There’s always somebody willing to give help or guidance.
The library staff and the admin office team are really nice too, everybody’s so friendly. Sometimes you come into university feeling all stressed about an assignment and by the time you leave, you’re reassured it’s all going to be fine! It’s those little things that make you want to keep coming back to a place. The support is amazing.
The majority of students on the course are midwives; other professions include health visitors, nurses and managers. It’s really interesting to meet different people from other roles. I’d actually like to be able to work with my fellow students more, but I tend to be very busy with work when I’m not at university so I don’t get to spend as much time with them as I’d like to. We do try to meet when we can though.
Looking to the future....
I’d really like to get involved with service development and quality improvement, and ideally some kind of international work or consultancy. I’d love to be involved with international agencies as well as working for the NHS. There are so many interesting aspects of maternal and child health to explore.
