Julia Cooper's story: Winner of WaterWipes^® 2023 Pure Foundation Fund

I would like to nominate Julia Cooper, Lead Care Coordinator, East of England (EoE) Neonatal Operational Delivery Network (ODN). Following a dedicated career of >30 years in neonatal nursing, Julia has become an expert in family care including the concept of Family-Integrated Care (FICare) with sustained experience in the coordination of clinical care from admission through to discharge. In her previous role as neonatal manager, she coordinated the multi-agency team surrounding the family including setting up and embedding Transitional Care within Neonatal and Midwifery services. To this regard, she has been invited to speak at conferences and teach within the university setting. Julia was also the feeding lead for neonatal services and is trained by UNICEF in the Baby Friendly Initiative to trainer status. In her current role, Julia assists and supports neonatal units across the region, leading a team of care coordinators to develop, improve and enhance family care across the perinatal pathway and ensuring families of sick/preterm infants are supported through neonatal services. Julia demonstrates excellent collaborative leadership of her team in relation to implementing various ODN initiatives that have made a real difference to the support of parents; namely, a parent passport, parent information resources and feedback surveys in conjunction with BLISS. She has supported units to achieve their highly valued BLISS Baby Charter accreditation and leads on the well-evaluated EoE ‘FICare’ conference. The above highlights that Julia goes ‘over and above’ in various ways, further demonstrated by being vice-chair of the EoE regional group for the UK Neonatal Nurses Association, representing neonatal nurses and the parent voice, a voluntary role that is extra to her usual workload. She networks with a range of other professionals nationally, such as Bliss and the National Care Coordinator group, to share learning and work across all networks. She was recently invited to teach about her expertise in FICare for Hertfordshire University’s BSc Honours children’s nursing programme, showcasing a high quality of teaching materials and resources prepared for the students, again demonstrating an ‘over and above’ effort and commitment. I believe Julia is a key contributing factor to enhancing the experience of parents in their neonatal care trajectory. If successful in achieving this award, the funding would help contribute to Julia and her team/ODN colleagues in disseminating the above successes at key national / international conferences in 2024.

Julia Petty