Dr Sarah Joyce is an ESRC Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK. She completed her PhD in 2018 at the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield. She qualified as an architect from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her fellowship work is a year of dissemination and public engagement with her thesis research on the architecture of birth spaces. Her research challenges how architects, clients and all the design team think about the delivery of maternity care within wider healthcare settings. Her presentation at this year’s conference in the Year of the Midwife is a timely reminder for designers of their role in the significant moves in UK maternity services policy and practice to provide respectful and personalised maternity care.
She has 24 years’ experience in architectural practice in London and Yorkshire and immerses herself in the world of those with whom she researches through antenatal teaching and service user representation for NHS maternity services.