Felicity Jones
Biography
Biography
Having had a background in adult nursing and midwifery I qualified as a Health Visitor in 1998. My health visiting experience has included working as a health visitor (GP attached and corporate team), a liaison health visitor for a Walk-in Centre and a practice development health visitor. Before joining the university full-time in August 2012 I worked as a Practice Development Facilitator in a Children's Public Health 0 to 19 Team in Surrey.
As a Practice Development Facilitator, I have worked both at a local and strategic level to develop practice for health visiting and school nursing services. My role included the setting up training programmes, the development of guidelines (including multi-agency work that has also involved the voluntary sector) and implementing new ways of working. This work also gave me a wide breadth of experience in developing evidence based practice to support service provision for identified local health needs; through analysis of research, government papers, demographic data and service audit.
Teaching
I teach on MSc/BSc Public Health Practice
Module TutorExtending Professional Practice - Building Community Capacity
Module LeadEarly Intervention Work with Children, Parents and Carers
My publications
Publications
Aim: To evaluate the effectiveness of prescribed postnatal exercise on postnatal
depression. Prescribed exercise was defined as any physical activity that was carried out in
the postnatal period with the objective of reducing postnatal depression, as determined by
identified scales.
Background: Research has identified that regular physical exercise interventions are
beneficial to mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety.
Design: A systematic review and narrative analysis of randomised controlled trials (RCTs)
reporting on the effectiveness of prescription postnatal exercise on postnatal depression.
Data sources: Selection criteria included full text, academic articles written in English
comparing exercise retrieved from MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, EMBASE and SPORTDiscus.
Research focusing on postnatal or postpartum exercise or physical activity; depression or
mood swings, published between 2008 and 2016 was included. The search was refined to
include females aged eighteen years or more.
Review methods: Forty-seven articles were initially identified and full text analysis was
performed by two members of the research team. Twelve articles were identified as
meeting the inclusion criteria and were distributed for scrutiny and assessment amongst
the five members of the research team. Methodological quality was assessed using a
Quality Assessment Tool for Quantitative Studies published by the Effective Public Health
Practice Project (EPHPP) (1998). Finally the articles were redistributed amongst the team
for a second assessment and verification. Discrepancy of ratings for a paper between the
reviewers was resolved by a third reviewer through reassessment of the paper and further
discussion.
Results: Eight studies were included in the final systematic review carried out using the
EPHPP assessment tool; the review identified six quality RCTs meeting the inclusion criteria.
Conclusions: The findings indicate that a tailored exercise intervention can effectively
alleviate postnatal depressive symptoms, benefiting women both physically and
psychologically. Social support experienced by participants in relation to the exercise
intervention was seen to have a positive impact.