BaBi Wakefield
Welcome to Wakefield!
Wakefield District is home to over 345,000 people, living and working in city, urban and rural settings across the region. The district covers an area of 338km2, with a culturally diverse population.
Maternity services across the district are provided by Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust (MYHT) across three sites, in Dewsbury, Pontefract and Wakefield.
Born and Bred in Wakefield (BaBi Wakefield)
Born and Bred in Wakefield (BaBi Wakefield) is an exciting initiative which aims to link existing data across health, education, and social care to create a picture of families’ lives over time.
BaBi Wakefield is our local place for BiB4All. Developed in Bradford, this is one of the largest research studies in the world, aiming to find out what influences the health and wellbeing of families. It is now expanding to reach other areas and regions, including Wakefield.
BaBi Wakefield provides an opportunity to explore regional maternal and child health and wellbeing issues. Using local data which is routinely collected, this birth study will support the development of shared research, investigating key questions around the health of people living in Wakefield and how this can be improved. This will provide a really useful insight for service providers, researchers and commissioners, to help inform the future development of services.
It is our first significant venture for the newly established collaborative Wakefield Research Hub, focusing on maternity services initially and reflecting the interests and concerns of local people.
Who can join BaBi Wakefield?
All women from Wakefield and the surrounding areas who are booked to receive maternity care with MYHT can join the project, for themselves and their baby. We hope to include as many people as possible over the next five years. If you would like to take part, please ask your midwife or another maternity worker during your regular antenatal appointments.
Our objectives
To build a local resource for future research and contribute to the development of regional and national resources in maternal and child health and wellbeing.
To look for patterns which may help identify early indications on poor health and wellbeing.
To link together data which is routinely collected by multiple services.
To investigate how the health and wellbeing of mothers and children develops over time.
To share information with all women booking maternity services in Wakefield District.
To include more women in BaBi Wakefield every year.
Who’s involved in BaBi Wakefield?
BaBi Wakefield is a collaboration, including:
Conexus GP Confederation
Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust (MYHT)
Wakefield Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG)
Wakefield Council
South West Yorkshire Partnership Foundation Trust (SWYPFT)
Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS)
Check out the BaBi Wakefield website here: www.midyorks.nhs.uk/babi
Meet our Principal Investigator: Judith Holliday
Judith is Head of Research at Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, leading a team responsible for research delivery, quality and governance. She works with a range of partners to deliver high quality research opportunities to improve patient care and population health. She is currently co-applicant on an National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) funded project (WHOSE) with partners in the Wakefield area looking at housing support for patients being discharged from hospital. She was also co-applicant on an NIHR funded study which reported in 2020, looking at the vision and capacity for public health research in Wakefield: “Local Authority Research Systems: exploring the will and readiness for research in Wakefield”.
As the Trust’s Sponsor representative, Judith has been a member of several research steering groups, including MotiVar: “Motivating weight loss through a personalised avatar” and “Point of care creatinine testing in diagnostic imaging”. In 2020/2021 she had a leading role within the “Wakefield Together” partnership to deliver AstraZeneca’s global COVID-19 antibody trial. The team recruited the first global participant.
She Chairs the Wakefield Research Hub which is a place-based collaborative partnership with a vision to deliver high quality research that responds to the needs of people in Wakefield, delivered by a flexible, responsive multidisciplinary workforce that are excellent and innovative at what they do.
Between 2018 and 2020 she was seconded to work part time alongside her Trust role, as a Research Impact Fellow with NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care Yorkshire and Humber (CLAHRC YH), to develop the VICTOR research impact tool which helps to identify and make visible the impacts of undertaking research in the NHS.
Judith has a background in social research design and delivery with experience across national and regional health, housing strategy, regeneration and development programmes. She has worked for Homes England, the Academy for Sustainable Communities (a national government body leading on skills and knowledge for the delivery of sustainable communities) and Yorkshire Forward (the Regional Development Agency). She has a Masters Degree in Social and Public Policy. Judith is Chair of the Yorkshire and Humber “R&D Ops” group, a member of the Improvement Academy Network and in 2018, completed the NIHR/Ashridge Business School Leadership Development Programme.
Further information:
VICTOR Research Impact Tool: http://clahrc-yh.nihr.ac.uk/victorimpact
https://www.nihr.ac.uk/blog/a-victor-y-for-measuring-research-impact-in-the-nhs/12081
Making occupational therapy research visible: amplifying and elevating the contribution and impacts, Natalie Louise Jones, Jo Cooke, Judith Holliday. First published April 1 2021 Editorial. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308022620988473
Hassan Ugail, Rokas Mackevicius, Maryann Hardy, Andrew Hill, Maria Horne, Trevor Murrells, Judith Holliday and Rajeswaran Chinnadorai, MotiVar: Motivating Weight Loss Through A Personalised Avatar, In Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Software, Knowledge, Information Management and Applications (SKIMA), IEEE, 2019.
DOI:10.1109/SKIMA47702.2019.8982405, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8982405
Email: Judith.holliday@nhs.nhs.uk
Tel: 01924 543772
Twitter: @MYorksResearch
