A four-hour feeding schedule on a Swindon postnatal ward gave Sally Marchant the question that shaped her working life: where was the evidence? Marchant, the British midwife, researcher and editor who pursued that question across clinical care, academia and publishing, died in June 2026 at 71.

Born in Dundee and raised partly in Worcester Park in south-west London, Marchant trained at the Wolfson School of Nursing at Westminster Hospital. Midwifery study in Perth and special baby care training in Stockport followed. By the mid-1970s, she was caring for mothers and newborns at Princess Margaret Hospital in Swindon. When a ward rule required babies to wait four hours between feeds, she found no sound reason for it and adopted a more responsive approach, according to The Guardian. The episode revealed a broader problem: familiar routines could outlast the evidence meant to justify them.

From 1986 to 1990, Marchant worked in industrial relations at the Royal College of Midwives, helping colleagues address grading and pay. In 1991 she joined the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit at Oxford University. There she could investigate postnatal health, a part of maternity care whose ordinary procedures often rested on assumption rather than tested knowledge.

Her central research effort became the BLiPP study of blood loss after childbirth and the observations used to assess recovery. A Bournemouth University research review records a final report by Marchant, Jo Alexander and Jo Garcia in 1997, followed by BLiPP 2 in 1998. The work documented women's experiences, developed recommendations and produced information for patients and professionals.

Marchant kept the research tied to what women encountered after leaving the delivery room. A 2002 study indexed by the National Library of Medicine found that 64 of 325 respondents reported problems with postnatal bleeding from 28 days through three months after birth, while treatment and referral varied. A 2006 study examined factors linked to hospital care for excessive or prolonged bleeding and uterine infection. Her findings turned an easily overlooked area of recovery into questions clinicians could measure and act upon.

Marchant later explained that midwives had been approaching the same task differently because the evidence did not show which method was best. Bournemouth University said the team's recommendations informed midwifery texts and World Health Organization guidance. Her method stayed close to the ward: notice variation, test whether it was defensible and seek an answer useful to both midwives and mothers.

She became a senior lecturer at Bournemouth University in 2000 and received her PhD from the University of Portsmouth in 2002. From 2003 to 2012 she edited Midwifery Digest, helping carry research into practice. Her published work also included a 2009 history of postnatal care that placed modern routines within centuries of changing expectations for midwives.

Marchant also served the profession through the Iolanthe Midwifery Trust. After receiving Iolanthe awards in 1992 and 1997, she was a trustee from 1999 to 2004 and also chaired the charity. In its institutional memorial, the trust credited her work on strategy, governance and regulation with strengthening its foundations.

Her practical imagination extended beyond formal work. Sir Simon Russell Beale, whom she babysat as a young woman, recalled her filling long family car journeys with wool, needles and lessons in crocheting blankets. Marchant later contributed to choirs and continued baking and needlework. She moved from Wroughton in Wiltshire to Ipswich to be closer to her sister Gillian.

Marchant's contribution persists in a precise chain of work: questions raised on postnatal wards, studies that documented women's experiences, guidance that gave clinicians firmer ground and publications that carried those findings into practice. The feeding rule she challenged early in her career became the pattern of a lifetime, an insistence that care for mothers and babies deserved reasons as well as routines.