We are extremely proud and excited to reveal that Baby Lifeline’s Founder and CEO, Judy Ledger, has been awarded an MBE in King Charles’ Birthday Honours List this year.
Baby Lifeline
Judy has been at the helm of the charity Baby Lifeline since it was founded in 1981. After the loss of three consecutive prematurely-born babies, Judy set out to fundraise for an incubator, as a thank you to the maternity hospital in Coventry where her babies sadly died, and where she worked as a state registered nurse.
Since then, Judy has worked tirelessly to improve pregnancy and birth outcomes in her own community, across the United Kingdom and overseas. Over the last 40 years she has raised many millions of pounds to improve maternity care, supported by a tiny team employed by the charity
In recognition of her work, Judy was awarded an Honorary Master’s degree by the University of Coventry in 1994, and in 2019 she was privileged to receive a prestigious Distinguished Service Medal from the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists.
Judy now has three children thanks to the specialist care she received during her subsequent pregnancies.
Baby Lifeline’s National and International Impact
Equipment for Maternity and Neonatal Units
Largely thanks to Judy’s fundraising efforts, the charity has provided many millions of pounds’ worth of equipment – ranging from handheld dopplers to monitor a baby’s heart rate, to major scanners and fetal monitoring machines – to maternity and neonatal units all over the UK and beyond.
Baby Lifeline Community Midwifery Bags
Recognising the urgent need to standardise equipment carried by midwives to births in the community, the charity convened a multi-professional clinical working group to develop a ‘gold standard’ community midwifery bag in 2019.
Following a successful pilot scheme, Baby Lifeline began supplying midwifery bags to NHS Trusts across the UK. To date, the charity has supplied around 1,500 midwifery bags to NHS Trusts and individuals throughout the country and overseas. The use of these specially designed and kitted bags improve efficiency for midwifery teams and enhance patient safety.
Training for Maternity Health Professionals
Judy Ledger has been instrumental in developing and providing innovative, unique and award-winning training for maternity health professionals since 2000. The expert-led training allows professionals across the maternity and neonatal sector to train together in evidence-based best practice relating to key topics shown to cause avoidable harm and death. These advanced courses are seldom covered by current mandatory training, and are delivered by world-renowned medical, midwifery, nursing and legal professionals.
Judy’s determination to ensure that training is as accessible as possible for an underfunded NHS workforce has meant that many tens of thousands of professionals have been able to access the courses, whether face to face or online, in the UK and overseas. Baby Lifeline Training, a social enterprise, trains around 3000-4000 delegates per year, andis a leading provider of CPD training to the NHS maternity sector.
Humanitarian assistance for Iraq and Ukraine
Against all the odds, Judy Ledger organised a conference in Kuwait to provide training for nearly 300 Iraqi and Kuwaiti clinicians in 2005. This was no mean feat, as it was a politically turbulent time in the Middle East.
With the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Judy launched Baby Lifeline’s Ukraine Appeal in March 2022. Despite numerous difficulties in logistics and organisation, the charity has so far donated and delivered over £1.7 million in vital maternity safety equipment to those caring for mothers and babies in some of the most dangerous frontline areas of Ukraine. At the time of writing, around 1 in 10 hospitals in Ukraine have been targeted and destroyed during this war. The equipment includes the donation of 153 Baby Lifeline community midwifery bags – invaluable in circumstances where so many maternity units have been destroyed.
Ground-breaking research
Training for professionals in maternity remains a central recommendation to improve care and make pregnancy and labour safer, and yet there has been no thorough national audit of the training undertaken by maternity professionals in the UK.
Under Judy’s leadership, Baby Lifeline went on to produce three ground-breaking reports, detailed below. These reports add sufficient weight to the argument that the prioritisation and standardisation of training on the frontline will make pregnancy and birth safer.
2016, in collaboration with the University of Hull: ‘Mind the Gap – An Investigation into the Training Gap between NHS Trusts in England’.
2018 and 2021: ‘Mind the Gap – An Investigation into Maternity Training for Frontline Professionals Across the UK.’
Baby Lifeline is immensely proud to have achieved so much over the years, none of which would have been possible without Judy’s determination and commitment to making labour and birth safer and better for every family. We are so pleased to see her hard work recognised in King Charles’ Birthday Honours List this year.
“The charity has been a lifeline for me following the loss of my babies, Lisa, Emma and Stuart, and to think that my work has been recognised with an MBE is truly humbling. It is also wonderful that patient safety in maternity and neonatal services are being recognised.
At Baby Lifeline and Baby Lifeline Training, we have the honour of working with truly passionate and dedicated health professionals – I would not have been able to achieve what I have without their support and guidance over the years.”