The National Clinical Guidelines are a programme of work agreed between the National Women and Infants Health Programme (NWIHP) and the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (IOG) of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI). Established in mid-2021, the Guideline Programme Team recently published its Summer 2024 Update. To date 20 guidelines have been launched under the new Guideline Programme (see details below) and a further 24 guidelines are under development.

The 15^th International Graphic Medicine Conference took place at the Technological University of the Shannon (TUS) Athlone from 16-18 July. Attended by Professor Keelin O'Donoghue, Dr Brendan Fitzgerald and Marita Hennessy PhD, the event explored how to communicate complex medical information through comics and art, and included work from the Pregnancy Loss Research Group.

Professor Keelin O’Donoghue and Dr Alex Dakin attended and presented at the 28^th International Conference on Prenatal Diagnosis and Therapy, held in Boston from 07-10 July 2024.

We are currently inviting applications for a Postdoctoral Researcher – Knowledge Broker to support knowledge translation for academic research projects and community-based activities across women’s health services in Ireland, under the aegis of the National Women and Infants Health Programme (NWIHP). This is a two-year, full-time position.

Congratulations to Dr Laura Linehan who was a joint winner of the UCC College of Medicine and Health Postgraduate Researcher of the Year 2024 Award. This award recognises outstanding contribution by a postgraduate research student in their research field.

Ruadh Kelly-Harrington and Marita Hennessy PhD presented a series of studies from the PLACES project at the recent Gender Work and Organization Conference (GWO2024). The hybrid session was the second of three concurrent sessions on grief and loss in organisations.

The Pregnancy Loss Research Group and Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century (ISS21) co-hosted a seminar on ‘Perinatal loss: Challenging the norms in the Czech context’ on 17 June. Dr Iva Šmídová, an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, delivered the seminar while on an Erasmus exchange with academics at ISS21.

Marita Hennessy PhD recently joined David Geary, Director of Communications, and Maeve McCafferty, Equality Officer, with the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) on the ‘Teacher Talk with the INTO’ podcast to discuss issues surrounding the INTO’s campaign to secure paid reproductive health leave for its members.

Dr Tamara Escañuela Sánchez and Ruadh Kelly-Harrington presented at the 20^th Annual Psychology, Health and Medicine Conference, held at University College Cork on Friday 31 May.

Caroline Joyce presented her work on the use of the Abbott i-STAT®1 Point of Care device for hCG monitoring in early pregnancy at the 12^th European Organisation for the Treatment of Trophoblastic Disease meeting in Stockholm on 24 May.