Molly O'Brien RM, BSc, AHBM

Molly O’Brien is an experienced midwife with over 28 years in practice, more than 20 of which were spent working full time in clinical roles within the NHS. She is also a birth preparation teacher, associate university lecturer, and the creator of specialist education programmes in biomechanics for birth for midwives and other birth professionals.

A long-standing advocate of physiological birth and strong midwifery skills, Molly has campaigned for woman-centred models of care throughout her career, including campaigning for midwife-led birth units in 2000. Much of her clinical career was spent in settings that actively supported physiological birth, including five years as a team midwife in a maternity service with the highest home birth rate in the UK at the time, followed by more than nine years in a midwife-led unit. During this period, she attended hundreds of undisturbed physiological births, developing and refining the clinical skills at the heart of midwifery practice.

Witnessing the wide variation in normal labour physiology deepened her ability to recognise when birth was not progressing well and led her to explore the underlying causes of labour dystocia. This included examining the influence of pelvic health, modern sedentary lifestyles, increasing medicalisation, and the limited teaching of biomechanics within maternity education and training. From this work, she developed practical, respectful strategies to support labour progress using maternal movement and biomechanical techniques.

Since 2018, Molly has travelling widely to teach these gentle, effective and evidence-informed approaches to supporting physiological birth and resolving mechanical difficulties in labour. In person, she has run two hundred and seventy courses visiting over a hundred hospitals and universities including Stornoway, Letterkenny , Santander, Madrid and even Chile.  Her online courses have been taken up all over the UK and Europe and have reached hospitals and universities in Australia, Bermuda, Saudi Arabia, Greece and Croatia. We can't offer an exact count but with an average twenty on face to face courses and three thousand registered online it must have reached at least eight thousand midwives, doulas and other birth workers.

She is currently developing a sustainable Train the Trainer programme for NHS maternity units, designed to embed biomechanics for birth within local practice and support cultural change, alongside a parallel programme to integrate updated, physiology-based and biomechanical content into undergraduate and postgraduate university midwifery curricula. Through this work, Molly aims to strengthen midwifery education, protect physiological birth, and equip future generations of midwives with the skills and confidence to support women and babies safely and effectively.

 

What participants say

"Really one of the standout professional development events I have participated in over my 23 years in midwifery. Thank you so much. I will most definitely use the information I learnt from the course to support my midwifery and obstetric colleagues to help and guide women in labour to stay in labour!"  (Dr Sara Bayes PhD RN RM FACM,  Vice Chancellor's Professorial Research Fellow,| Professor, Midwifery Edith Cowan University)

"I loved it, I feel this course should be compulsory for all student midwives, midwives and obstetricians."

"It has been amazing, really reflected on my practice and made me feel sad in some ways that I didn't know about this before thinking of some of the outcomes I had with women may have been different. But I am going to take so much of this forward, I have recently stepped away from the NHS to do my own maternity business, but this has made me want to go back for some bank shifts and try and make a difference and spread the word as I love labour care. So thank you Lyn and Molly for reminding me of what it can be like and being so kind and passionate about what you do. Thank you."

"This course has made me feel more empowered as a student midwife, in a time where there is so much doom and gloom on the news about the state of midwifery. I love all of the reading/ resource recommendations given in the session. It means I can go away and continue the positive learning journey."

"What a fantastic course that I feel has brought me back to being a midwife rather than an obstetric nurse. I've felt so out of control and helpless as a labour ward midwife for so long and this has brought me back to feeling like I am helping women be equipped to optimise their own. This is an area of midwifery that we tend to miss out on due to obstetric and staffing pressures. It has given me fire in my belly, and the confidence to use this in women with labour dystocia to increase the chance of progression and vaginal birth when possible. Thank you for this amazing course that has given me back my love for midwifery, and reminded me of the reason I became a midwife in the first place!"

"Thank you so much for an incredible course. It was able to give me positive reflections for my families who later found they had back to back babies and experienced a lot of discomfort in their birth. I feel I am able to take the new information forward to help future families recognise signs of labour dystocia and provide appropriate tools to support them. Thank you so much again!" "A great interactive course, Molly’s passion is infectious" "Thank You wonderful session and so relevant to my practice and future practice"

"Thank you so much for an incredible course. It was able to give me positive reflections for my families who later found they had back to back babies and experienced a lot of discomfort in their birth. I feel I am able to take the new information forward to help future families recognise signs of labour dystocia and provide appropriate tools to support them. Thank you so much again!" "A great interactive course, Molly’s passion is infectious" "Thank You wonderful session and so relevant to my practice and future practice"