Dr Penny Sheehan
speaker
716 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 20 Jul
Dr Penny Sheehan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Mother's autonomy in decision making scale, the madam.
Um uh so y I I'd strongly encourage services um and practitioners to go out there and try and try and see how safe me try and measure how safe their women feel.
You know, that might give some really good um uh feedback and some um more improvement work that can be done because uh the birth suite safety culture is critical.
I I'd just like to add um uh about the birth birth suite being um the coalface, it is hard and um uh we sort of alluded to vicarious trauma for staff.
Um and I'd like everybody to have a think and take stock of your own mental health.
Thank you.
My name's Dr Penny Sheehan.
I'm an obstetrician from the Royal Women's Hospital in Melbourne and among other things that I've done for the last three years, I've been the clinical lead for the maternity and newborn improvement team at Safer Care Victoria and have had involvement with the Safer Baby Collaborative and implementation of the Safer Baby Bundle, both at a service level and also at the level of Safer Care.
We know that the relationship between maternal age and stillbirth risk follows a U-shaped kind of curve with higher rates at younger ages and also in women aged over 35.
And I've got to say the latter group is making up more and more of our maternity population.
Women in their first pregnancy have a higher likelihood of stillbirth.
The modifiable factors that are associated with increased risk include maternal smoking, maternal BMI greater than 30, a habit of sleeping on your back throughout the whole night.
There's a well-documented disparity in stillbirth rates between our First Nations people and other populations within Australia.
And a lot of work is being done to try and address this.
Rates are approximately 50% higher in our First Nations women.
And so that's, you know, around 13 compared to seven, say, per thousand births.
There's a whole complex interplay of factors there contributing to this access to care, the social determinants of health, as well as systemic inequities.
Apart from our First Nations women born in Australia, also maternal country of birth is associated with variation in stillbirth rates.
And women born in South Asia and parts of Africa, even in Australia, do experience higher rates.
So the bundle aims to reduce the late gestation stillbirths, so that's stillbirths in women over 28 weeks gestation, by 20%.
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