Pieta Shakes

Pieta Shakes is overly enthusiastic about patient experience and person-centred care within our fast-paced systems and society. After twelve years of clinical mental health roles, Pieta transitioned into academia with a professional goal to improve equity, diversity and the translation of evidence into practice. Pieta's research is focused on the psychosocial aspects of prenatal diagnosis - experiences, psychosocial outcomes and care of parents who receive unexpected news about the health, development or genetics of their unborn baby. As an extension of this, Pieta also explores the way research and clinical services engage, partner with, and support people with lived experience in a way that moves beyond tokenism. Pieta has authored research publications exploring maternal experiences, communication in prenatal care, and structural/workforce challenges to holistic care for families who receive a prenatal diagnosis and her human-centred approach to her work is informed by both professional expertise and lived experience.

Pieta has submitted her PhD thesis for examination and has been fortunate enough to collaborate on and lead other research projects that utilised a range of methodologies and methods. Current research projects seek to;

- coproduce training resources with parents who received a fetal anomaly diagnosis (Principal Investigator)
- explore the meaning of a fetal diagnosis for an Aboriginal community (co-Principal Investigator)
- explore experiences and preferences for care related to a termination for medical reasons (Associate Investigator)
- co-design a digital tool to better equip parents to receive balanced, strengths-based information about their child informed by the lived experiences of other families (Associate Investigator)
- investigate causes and potential treatments for perinatal intrusions (Consumer Advisor). 

Pieta has postgraduate qualifications in mental health nursing, child and adolescent mental health, diagnostic genomics and higher education innovative teaching and learning and is credentialed with CHIA. She is the founder and Executive Director of Through the Unexpected, co-Chair of the Perinatal Society of Australia and New Zealand Perinatal Ethics Committee. With a focus on research translation and implementation, Pieta frequently offers consultation to services wishing to improve care for parents who receive a prenatal diagnosis, prepares parliamentary submissions, collaborates on guidelines and speaks at events. 

As a full-time Teaching and Research Academic, Pieta manages the research portfolio of subjects within the Master of Nursing, and Effective Clinical Governance. Alongside this work, Pieta collaboratively developed a national microcredential program related to digital health. She is currently leading a project to co-design the first Australian multidisciplinary microcredential program on the psychosocial aspects of fetal diagnosis, which builds upon transformative, constructivist and critical learning theories and aligns with the Australian Microcredentials Framework.