I’m Liane Powell and I’ve been a midwife for 22 years. I have always believed that women and families need to be at the heart of maternity care, and that we as professionals have so much to learn from the experiences of the people we care for.

I started to work with SOFT UK back in 2015, when I first started working in the screening team in Public Health England (PHE). I was given the enormous and important task of making sure that all health care professionals involved in the offer of screening for Down’s syndrome, Edwards’ syndrome and Patau’s syndrome felt confident and competent talking to parents about screening, high chance results and diagnosis of these conditions.

PHE worked really closely with various parent support organisations on this project, SOFT UK being one. We took this opportunity to go back to basics, because it had been some years since any national education or training had taken place around these 3 conditions.

From the beginning, it was clear that we needed to focus on the conversations that occur between parents and health care professionals, and there was no better way to do this than to involve parents and SOFT UK trustees. By listening and learning from the experiences of this inspirational group of people, we started to build a comprehensive face-to-face and cascade training package, which included what and what not to say, how to respond, how to listen; just generally what to do that could help or hinder at a time of enormous need.

The people at SOFT UK were incredibly generous with their time, expertise, and intensely personal and often difficult experiences, because it was this selfless bravery which made the training such a resounding success. SOFT UK parents told their stories on camera and in front of live audiences of hundreds of health care professionals, (midwives, obstetricians and sonographers) and I can honestly say that the audiences were captivated by these stories every time they were told. We even had one instance when one of the parent speakers was reunited with the obstetrician who had cared for his family- there wasn’t a dry eye in the house!

This collaboratively developed training evaluated extremely well, with virtually all of the 400+ attendees feeling more confident and competent discussing Edwards’ syndrome and Patau’s syndrome with parents.

This is honestly my career highlight to date, and much of that is down to SOFT UK, their incredible group of parents and their passion to make things better.