Lesley Ann Page

Lesley Ann Page, Visiting Professor of Midwifery at King’s College London, has been recognized by Marquis Who’s Who Top Nurses for dedication, achievements, and leadership in midwifery and perinatal care.

Professor Dr. Page is a midwife and educator who has dedicated her career to changing cultural and institutional attitudes about birth and medical care through the promotion of midwifery. She has been named one of the NHS’ 70 Most Influential Nurses and Midwives at the 70th anniversary of the NHS and has been featured in the 2018 Netflix documentary “Birth Reborn” in addition to numerous professional publications and media outlets. Dr. Page holds a Bachelor of Arts from The Open University and a Master of Science from the University of Edinburgh and was awarded her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Technology Sydney in 2004. She started her career as a staff nurse at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1966, fulfilling a childhood dream, and continued general nursing through the 1970s, when her interest in midwifery as a women’s movement and an autonomous discipline in Canada began to develop. Dr. Page, who became registered as a midwife In Scotland in  1966, became a practitioner educator in Canada in 1979 and spent the next six years as a continuing education coordinator for Vancouver’s Grace Hospital, where she helped establish​ the first legally recognized midwifery practice in Canada.

She returned to Oxford in 1986 as the Director of Midwifery at the John Radcliffe Maternity Services and became the first Professor of Midwifery in the UK  at Thames Valley University and Queen Charlotte’s and Hammersmith Hospital in 1991. Here she established One-to-One Midwifery practice, a radically different approach to organizing midwifery where midwives provide continuity of care to individual women, at Queen Charlotte’s and Hammersmith Hospital in 1992. Throughout her career, Dr. Page has taught and researched at more than a dozen institutions across the world, including the University of Iceland, Tokushima University, Otago Polytechnic, the UBC School of Medicine, and the Hong Kong Institute of Advanced Nursing. She retains faculty positions with King’s College London, University of Technology Sydney, Griffith University Queensland, Australia and Oxford Brookes University, and is past president of the Royal College of Midwives. Dr. Page was a member of the Department of Health Expert Committee advising on the policy document ‘Changing Childbirth’, was an advisor to the House of Commons Health Select Committee, Deputy Chair of the English National Board for Nursing Midwifery and Health Visiting, and is an advisor to the NHS England reference group for continuity of midwifery care. In recognition of her work on behalf of the field of midwifery, Dr. Page was made a Commander of the British Empire for services to midwifery and has been awarded two honorary doctorates and numerous national-level accolades and fellowships. She is currently working on her autobiography titled “Birth, Love, and Life,” and looks forward to continuing her work to improve maternity care by implementing and improving midwifery in the coming years.