In August, Dr Margaret Charnley and I, (Dr Julie Abayomi), both from Edgehill University were fortunate enough to be selected by the Society to attend MegaEvento - SaoMega2019 - in Brazil. We agreed to deliver a workshop about Maternal Nutrition on the first day of the conference.
We were greeted on arrival at Guarulhos airport by the Mega Evento organiser, Cláudio and his wife Sibele, with our workshop scheduled for the following day (Thursday 22 August). Everyone was so friendly and welcoming, from Cláudio, to the interpreter Marco and the students who attended our sessions. In the morning we presented a comparison of UK guidelines and Brazilian recommendations on maternal nutrition with guidance to the additional dietary requirements of vulnerable pregnant women. We also held a prize draw, to win 2 editions of the NS Introduction to Human Nutrition textbook (translated into Portuguese), and the lucky prizewinners were happy to pose for a photograph.
In the afternoon we presented our research papers on the experiences and perceptions of midwives in delivering weight management and healthy eating advice to pregnant women with obesity, and a Public Patient Involvement investigation into healthy eating and weight management advice during pregnancy. These were both positively received, generating lots of interesting questions.
On Friday (23 August), we visited Sao Paolo University, specifically their midwifery department (Obstetriz). This is the only midwifery programme for the whole of Brazil and has been running since 2005. To date they have trained 388 midwives for a population of over 210,000,000 people, so plenty of work to be done. We met with the programme leader Professor Claudia Medeiros de Castro and nutritionist Dr Anna Karenina Azevedo Martins. We presented an overview of our research to staff and students; with lots of interesting discussion afterwards. Hopefully a very successful international collaboration will result from our visit.
We would like to thank the Nutrition Society for their help, support and funding to allow this visit to be possible.