Paola Armato-Harris

Paola Armato-Harris joined Birmingham City University (BCU) in 2019, achieving a career-long ambition to become a midwifery lecturer. Paola has a passion for teaching and mentoring, and has played an active role in the midwifery education pathway. She supports the clinical Trust in the Black Country, where she has worked since completing her qualification.

After completing her degree at the University of Wolverhampton in early 2013, Paola worked as a full-time midwife at her hospital of training- Dudley Group Foundation NHS Trust, gaining valuable experience in all areas of maternity care settings. With her passion for teaching clearly evident early in her career, Paola was appointed as Clinical Lead for the Band 5 Preceptorship programme at the Trust, leading a team of preceptors in the support, training and assessment of Band 5 midwives, to ensure the successful completion of set clinical skills and knowledge competencies and contributing to the development of assessment criteria.

Paola’s specialisms lie with High Dependency Obstetric Care and Examination of the Newborn, and actively promotes advocacy and autonomy, particularly of very high-risk obstetric women, keen to ensure they too have experiences that ensure fully informed choice and empowerment. She is a qualified Professional Midwifery Advocate (PMA) and a trained practitioner in Examination of the Newborn, both of which were studied at Master’s Level.

Paola’s innovative ideas and practices within midwifery, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, have seen her appointment to Course Lead for the BSc Midwifery programme at BCU in 2024. Paola completed a postgraduate MSc in that same year, and has a determination to go on to complete a PhD in the future. Her qualitative research focused on her work within a highly respected and nationally renowned PMA team, who have published influential literature on the value and importance of supporting future midwives and pioneered the formation of the National Academic PMA network, with the vision of increasing ‘the voice’ of PMAs and facilitating a more equitable provision of academic PMA support.