Helen Fothergill

I always wanted to be a midwife, I was born at 28 weeks and think this started my fascination with human reproduction and it's outcomes.  I was recommended to complete my nursing qualification before starting my midwifery training.  I realised that I am not patient enough to be a midwife and so decided that sexual health was the way to go.  I did my elective placemet in sexual health and loved it.  On qualifying the only jobs were eye theatre or orthopaedics - neither of which has I done as a student.  I chose orthopaedics and it was a great experience for a newly qualified staff nurse. A training post came up in sexual health in Manchester and I was lucky enough to secure that in 2005.  I have never looked back, until a lecturer practitioner position with the University of Huddersfield came into my inbox and I loved being in that learning environment, a year later I made the leap to full time lecturing.

I have been involved with research throughout my career to date; including vaccination regimes for HIV positive patients, investigating a spike in new HIV diagnoses, cervical screening uptake in sexual health clinics, developing and evaluating a hub and spoke HIV service, text message health promotion for patients diagnosed with chlamydia, national PrEP (pre-exposure prophalyaxis) trial for preventing HIV transmission and a review of the testing of children of newly diagnosed HIV positive patients.