Dr Julie Abayomi is the new Associate Head of Applied Health and Social Care, who started work at Edge Hill University in June 2019. Dr Margaret Charnley is an Associate Tutor for the nutrition programmes. This August they were lucky enough to be awarded funding from UK The Nutrition Society, to travel to Brazil and attend Mega Evento Nutricao 2019 in Sao Paolo.
‘We were greeted on arrival at Guarulhos airport by the Mega Evento organisers, Cláudio and his wife Sibele, with our workshop scheduled for the following day (Thursday 22nd August). Everyone was so friendly and welcoming, from Cláudio, to the interpreter Marco and the students who attended our sessions. In the morning we presented a comparison of UK guidelines and Brazilian recommendations on maternal nutrition with guidance to the additional dietary requirements of vulnerable pregnant women. We also held a prize draw, to win 2 editions of the Nutrition Society Human Nutrition textbook, translated into Portuguese, the lucky prize winners were happy to pose for a photograph. In the afternoon we presented our research papers on the experiences and perceptions of midwives in delivering weight management and healthy eating advice to pregnant women with obesity and a Public Patient Involvement investigation into healthy eating and weight management advice during pregnancy, these were both positively received, generating lots of interesting questions.
On Friday (23rdAugust), we visited Sao Paolo University (www5.usp.br), specifically their midwifery department (Obstetriz). This is the only midwifery programme for the whole of Brazil and it has been running since 2005. To date they have trained 388 midwives for a population of over 210,000,000 people, so plenty of work to be done. We met with the programme leader Professor Claudia Medeiros de Castro and nutritionist Dr Anna Karenina Azevedo Martins. We presented an overview of our research to staff and students; with lots of interesting discussion afterwards. Hopefully a very successful international collaboration will result from our visit. We would like to thank the Nutrition Society for their help, support and funding to allow this visit to be possible.’
