Career
Cowan trained as a registered nurse at Middlemore Hospital in Auckland,beginning in 1966,and then travelled to Dunedin,where she intended to train as a doctor. [1] However having recently met her husband-to-be,photographer John Cowan,she decided not to put her home life and family on hold for the necessary six years of training,and moved into midwifery instead. [1] Cowan completed a masters titled Women's experience of severe early onset preeclampsia:a hermeneutic analysis at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) in 2015, [2] followed by a PhD also at AUT in 2020. [3]
Cowan is an authority on the hypertension in pregnancy,called pre-eclampsia. She co-founded and directed the charity NZ Action on Pre-eclampsia (NZ APEC) in 1994,which raises awareness among health professionals about the condition,and supports women and their families. [1] [4] The NZ APEC programme is considered to have contributed to lowering the mortality rate of pre-eclampsia. [4] Cowan also introduced a programme to monitor the growth of small babies,who are at risk of stillbirth,called the GAP (Growth Assessment Programme). Cowan had heard about the programme at a conference in America,and travelled to The Perinatal Institute in Birmingham to learn about how to apply it. After the programme's successful introduction at Middlemore,ACC provided funding to roll it out nationally. It more than doubled detection of small babies in some regions. [4] [1]
Before her retirement in August 2023,Cowan was a senior lecturer in the Department of Midwifery at AUT. [1] [5]
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