Jo Dagustun is a mum of four and lives in North-West England. Jo has been active in the maternity service improvement community since 2008, working in public policy for various organisations before that.

Jo is a long-standing member of her local Maternity Voices Partnership and has been a volunteer with the Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services (AIMS) since 2017. In her AIMS role, Jo is a member of NHS England’s Maternity and Neonatal Stakeholder Council, working collaboratively with others to promote improvements in the maternity services to better support all service users, whatever their maternity choices and pathways.

Jo looks forward to working as a PPI Advocate on this project, to act as a champion for the patient voice, helping to ensure that the work is highly focused on the patient benefit and experience throughout. This will be Jo’s second Public Co-Investigator role.

From her own studies as well as from her time with AIMS advocating for the implementation of Better Births (with its important focus on organisational learning), Jo has long been curious about what is (and isn't) being learnt in the maternity services, and is looking forward to investigating the impact of the Maternity Core Competency Framework.

As a geographer (BA Hons and MA), Jo holds a birth-related PhD (Learning to birth, mastering the social practice of birth: conceptualising birthing women as skilful and knowledgeable agents; University of Leeds, 2017), and focused her MBA dissertation on organisational learning in a UK government department (Cranfield, 1998).