Pieta Shakes

Pieta Shakes is overly enthusiastic about patient experience and person-centred care within our fast-paced systems and society. With a professional goal to improve equity, diversity and the translation of evidence into practice, Pieta was drawn towards education and research after her clinical career in mental health. As a Lecturer in the Master of Nursing, Pieta manages a suite of postgraduate subjects related to research and clinical governance.

Pieta's developing program of research focuses on the experience and psychosocial aspects of prenatal diagnosis. She is currently in the end stages of writing and editing her PhD thesis, after successfully publishing the findings of her hermeneutic phenomenological study of the maternal lived experience of receiving a prenatal diagnosis of agenesis of the corpus callosum. Pieta is also involved in other research projects that aim to address knowledge gaps in the experience and psychosocial outcomes of prenatal diagnosis and workforce perspectives, needs and training. Pieta is leading an innovative project to co-produce training resources alongside parents with lived experience of a prenatal diagnosis, and she herself is a mother who received a prenatal diagnosis at 32 weeks gestation.

Pieta is a credentialed mental health nurse with postgraduate qualifications in mental health nursing, child and adolescent mental health, diagnostic genomics and higher education innovative teaching and learning. She is the founder and Executive Director of Through the Unexpected, sits on the Perinatal Ethics Subcommittee of the Perinatal Society of Australia and New Zealand and frequently provides consultation on, or speaks at events about matters relating to diagnosis and prognosis communication, language, psychosocial outcomes and parent experience within prenatal diagnosis.