Jonathan Patrick and Scott Welpton ran Consultant Connect for a decade. Now they’ve joined Safer Birth, an Oxford University spinout whose first product, Fit4Labour, can flag high-risk labour up to 8.5 hours before a clinician typically would.
Jonathan Patrick writes…
Scott Welpton and I left Consultant Connect in the middle of last year, 10 happy years after we set it up. We’re both in our early fifties, so a break, rather than retirement, was on our minds, and we planned to look for something new to do around the autumn of 2026. As with all these things, though, you can’t tell when an opportunity is going to present itself, and I’m writing this sat opposite Scott with both of us new directors of the Oxford University spinout Safer Birth.
https://www.saferbirth.org.uk/
How we got involved with Safer Birth
Scott and I met Prof Antoniya Georgieva when she was fundraising for Safer Birth. Antoniya is a mathematician who has been researching large datasets of childbirth for over a decade. Antoniya, working with the Oxford Labour Monitoring Team, had developed the bones of a digital tool that can predict whether a labour was going to be high risk right at the beginning of labour. To give an idea, that is about 8 and a half hours earlier than a clinician would typically identify the labour as high risk.
This would be a huge development in childbirth risk assessment, which arguably hasn’t changed much in the last 50 years. Giving clinicians a tool to identify risk early in a standardised fashion could mean that interventions (like Caesarean sections) can be planned, reducing risky emergency procedures late in labour. Earlier intervention might mean that a baby avoids damage caused by a difficult labour continuing for longer. It could also provide reassurance when labour is low risk, again possibly contributing to fewer “unnecessary” interventions. A tool like this is an exciting prospect, and we agreed to invest. A few months later, we agreed to join Safer Birth to help them build the new company.
What we actually do
I get asked quite a lot what our jobs actually involve, given that all the academic work has already been done – the quick answer is everything that isn’t the design and validation of the tool. Our first job was to wrap our heads around the regulatory hurdles of getting a medical device classified for use, which is complex and time consuming. We then had to look at the resulting scope of the product we would offer and how it would develop in the future.
The result of this is that our first product is a simple risk calculator called Fit4Labour, which provides clinicians with better, more transparent information early in labour. It works as well for new clinicians as experienced old-hands and enables clear communication for decisions, including escalation decisions. We will achieve our Class 1 medical device classification by the end of this month.
Get in touch
We are now also telling our NHS colleagues what we are up to and looking for Trusts that would be willing to try Fit4Labour. This is where you come in – if you have colleagues in maternity who you think would be interested in our approach, please can you forward them this article? Cakes and biscuits will be supplied as a reward! Or if you’d rather skip straight to it, you can find out more and get in touch via saferbirth.org.uk.
Thanks again for all your help and support over the years as we built Consultant Connect, we hope to do the same with Safer Birth.
