Dr Sarah E Seaton

I am an Associate Professor in Perinatal and Paediatric Research in The Infant Mortality and Morbidity Studies group. I was awarded my undergraduate degree in Mathematics from the University of Wales, before doing my MSc in Medical Statistics and PhD both at Leicester. I have been working at the University of Leicester since 2009.

I am currently the co-principal investigator of the Paediatric Intensive Care Audit Network (PICANet). This is an international audit of all paediatric intensive care delivered in the UK and Ireland and is led jointly by the Universities of Leicester and Leeds. You can read more about PICANet at: https://www.picanet.org.uk/. Prior to PICANet, I have held three fellowships funded by the National Institute for Health Research. Most recently I completed an Advanced Fellowship in 2024 which aimed to investigate the transition from neonatal to paediatric care.

Following birth around one in seven babies require admission to specialist neonatal care. Reasons for admissions are varied and include: extreme prematurity; jaundice and infection. Lengths of stay in neonatal care are varied with some babies only requiring a few hours whilst others may need several months. Survival of babies admitted for neonatal care has improved in recent years. After discharge from neonatal care if a child requires specialist critical care again this will be received in a paediatric intensive care unit (PICU). The number of admissions to PICU has been increasing in recent years. We do not know how many children who were admitted for neonatal care are also admitted to PICU. Currently I am researching what happens to children who needed neonatal care in the first two years of their life. Currently I receive funding from the National Institute for Health Research.

Seaton SE; Battersby C; Davis PJ; Fenton AC; Anderson J; van Hasselt TJ; Draper ES. Characteristics of children requiring admissions to neonatal care and paediatric intensive care before the age of 2 years in England and Wales: a data linkage study. Archives of Disease in Childhood (online first)

van Hasselt T; Gale C; Battersby C; Davis P; Draper ES; Seaton SE. Paediatric intensive care admissions of preterm children born <32 weeks gestation: a national retrospective cohort study using data linkage. Archives of Disease in Childhood: Fetal and Neonatal Edition, 2023.

Smith LK, van Blankenstein E, Fox G, Seaton SE, Martínez-Jiménez M, Petrou S, Battersby C. Impact of new national guidance on survival for babies born at 22-weeks’ gestation in England and Wales: A population-based cohort. BMJ Medicine (online).

van Hasselt TJ, Kanthimathinathan HK, Kothari T, Plunkett A, Gale C, Draper ES, Seaton SE. Impact of prematurity on long-stay paediatric intensive care unit admissions in England 2008-2018. BMC Pediatrics (online)

Seaton SE, Manning J, Draper ES, Davis PJ, Mackintosh N. Understanding the co-construction of safety in the paediatric intensive care unit: a meta-ethnography of parents’ experience. Child: care, health and development (online)

Broadly I am willing to discuss PhD supervision in the area of perinatal, neonatal and paediatric epidemiology. My interests include but are not limited to the transition between services; care in the community; the impact of preterm birth and the experiences of using transport services.

My current PhD students are:

• Sadia Haqnawaz exploring the impact of second trimester baby loss
• Kirstin Webster investigating outcomes following a diagnosis of HIE
• Rhiannon Latham (LJMU) exploring the impact of living with a single ventricle

My previous PhD students are:

• Tim van Hasselt, PhD entitled: Preterm birth and paediatric intensive care (2024) 

Most, although not all, of my teaching is on our postgraduate taught degrees. I am the Deputy Lead for the MSc Quality and Safety in Healthcare and I lead the Dissertations module for QSH and the MRes in Applied Health Research. I supervise Masters degrees across several degrees.

I am also a postgraduate research (PGR/PhD) tutor for the department (you can read more about my PhD supervision in the Supervision tab).

Perinatal or paediatric epidemiology