Rate My Professor Niamh Ireland-Blake

Niamh Ireland-Blake is a Research Assistant in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Women's Health at the University of Otago, Wellington, Aotearoa, New Zealand. She is affiliated with this department in her research outputs. Her work focuses on informed choice within prenatal screening for chromosomal conditions, exploring epistemic positioning and equity in healthcare decision-making processes.

In 2025, Ireland-Blake served as first author on two peer-reviewed journal articles. The first, published on 9 January 2025 in BMC Medical Ethics, is titled “Knowledge was clearly associated with education.” epistemic positioning in the context of informed choice: a scoping review and secondary qualitative analysis. Co-authored with Fiona Cram, Kevin Dew, Sondra Bacharach, Jeanne Snelling, Peter Stone, Christina Buchanan, and Sara Filoche, the paper reviewed 29 studies from 2005 to 2021 using the PRISMA-ScR checklist. It analyzed how epistemic positioning—positioning people as credible knowers—affects informed choice measurement in prenatal screening. Knowledge tested included technical screening aspects, conditions, and mathematics. Twenty-seven studies linked informed choice to population descriptors such as race, ethnicity, age, and education, often reifying these as indicators of epistemic credibility. For instance, tertiary education compared to high school, and white race compared to others, were statistically significant predictors. The authors argue that such practices may perpetuate epistemic injustices and recommend treating descriptors as contextual variables indicating social privilege, alongside inclusive design for measures beyond biomedical hegemony.

Her second publication, appearing on 19 May 2025 in Health Expectations, is titled Time for a New Norm: Experiences of 'Being Informed' and 'Having Choice' for Prenatal Screening for Chromosomal Conditions: A Qualitative Study. With the same co-authors, Ireland-Blake handled writing the original draft, review and editing, data curation, and formal analysis. The study investigates pregnant people's experiences of information and choice in screening. In December 2023, she co-received a 12-month Health Delivery Research Activation Grant of $29,997 from the Health Research Council for 'Building space for equity: Bringing culture centred design to hospitals' with Associate Professor Sara Filoche.