Chris Warren
Yorkshire Storks started as“Your Way Midwifery Practice”, in Kent, in 1990. The impetus was the birth of Chris’s daughter Jess, born at home, and Chris’s wish to combine supportive midwifery with hands on mothering. A move to Yorkshire in 1993 and help from many other midwives, Deborah, Linda, Michelle, Nic, Debs, Kim, Jo and most recently Claire, and Sharyn, have all shaped the practice. Yorkshire Storks Childbirth Support is evolving, I will be collaborating again with Michelle and Kim to provide a more varied childbirth service that includes face to face, phone and virtual interactions. We are currently unable to provide birth care legally, due to a lack of indemnity insurance provision. We can help in so many other ways to overcome current difficulties and provide an alternative, but evidence-based view, to the over medicalisation of birth.
All Yorkshire Storks midwives practice within a “professional framework of autonomy, partnership, ethics and accountability” and we fight to maintain that status – more about this in our beliefs. We have been fighting for this since 1990.
Michelle Irving
I have been a midwife and childbirth educator for more than 20 years. I have a passion for helping women prepare to have the best birth for them. I love to help women learn about their bodies and how they can calmly birth their babies. Working with women to birth in the home setting has shown me how powerful women are. Seeing women using hypnobirthing techniques to achieve positive births motivated me to train with Calm Births, to become a hypnobirthing teacher. The courses are informal and tailored to your individual needs. They are designed to support you to achieve a positive, calm and gentle birth.
Since leaving Yorkshire Storks in 2010 I have gained a lot of experience in varied settings including humanitarian work in Liberia and Bangladesh. More recently I have gained a PhD and worked as a Midwifery Lecturer in the UK, teaching student midwives. Working at a joint midwifery and chiropractic clinic for infant feeding problems has given me new insights and knowledge which enables me to provide support for women via our additional services.
All the midwives at Yorkshire Storks are registered with the Nursing and Midwifery Council, NMC, the regulatory body for midwives in the UK. We attend regular professional updating sessions – though mostly virtual in the last year – to keep us up to date and in compliance with the Code. Through membership of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), we have indemnity insurance for antenatal and postnatal care.
