Lynne Staff

Lynne Staff has been a midwife for 40 years. She is a wife, and the proud mother of three grown sons. Lynne has worked in both the public and private maternity care sectors and established a home birth practice on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. In addition, she supports women to birth at home from 1993 until 2008. She has worked in midwifery education programs, both hospital and university-based. Currently, Lynne lectures in nursing and midwifery at the University of Tasmania.

Lynne helped establish the Nambour-Selangor Private Hospital Maternity Unit in 1997 where she continued to work up until June 2008. Lynne Staff completed an Honours project in 2006 in which she delved into the lived experience of Caesarean for women, and the choice for a non-medically indicated Caesarean for a first birth. She is currently in the data analysis stage of her PhD in which she is using mixed methods to explore “The meanings that mothers who have a scheduled Caesarean for a first birth, attach to labour and vaginal birth and to Caesarean”. Lynne is passionate about women’s perspectives of their birthing experience being made known through the telling of their own stories. This is important for all women, and especially women who experience a Caesarean: Caesarean research continues to have an overtly clinical emphasis. Caesarean is an operation that is performed on women, yet their accounts of their experiences are in the main, invisible in the literature relating to birth.

Lynne is also very interested in the complex sociological influences in contemporary birth culture, for example the implications of prolonged corporeal support of the bodies of brain-dead pregnant women, the impact of face-mask wearing on the face processing abilities of newborn infants and young children.

She and her husband live in Tasmania, where they raise alpacas and Murray Grey cattle. Lynne’s interests include history (especially childbirth, midwifery, and obstetrics!), spinning, middle eastern drumming, painting, and growing organic vegetables.

Qualifications

• Registered Midwife and Nurse
• Fellow of the Australian College of Midwives
• Honours, The Choice for Caesarean Section in a Normal Healthy First Pregnancy, Griffith University, Australia, 2005
• Master of Midwifery, Griffith University, Australia, 2000
• BHlthScNsg, Central Queensland University, Australia, 1995
• Currently a PhD candidate

Publications

Green, J., Staff, L., Bromley, P., Jones, L. and Petty, J., 2020, The implications of face masks for babies and families during the COVID-19 pandemic: A discussion paper, Journal of Neonatal Nursing, Vol 27 (1), pp 21-25. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1355184120301770

Staff, L. and Nash, M., 2017, Brain death during pregnancy and prolonged corporeal support of the body: A critical discussion, Women and Birth, 30, pp 354-360. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wombi.2017.01.009

Fenwick, J., Staff, L., Gamble, J., Creedy, D. and Bayes, S., 2010, Why do women request caesarean section in a normal healthy pregnancy? Midwifery, Vol 26(4), pp 394-400. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0266613808001046