The Cherish Project
Co-development of holistic, personalised support to improve experience and outcomes for those aiming for spontaneous labour and birth.
Cherish is a programme development project. This means we have been funded by the National Institute for Health Research to do the early work needed to co-design a personalised support package to improve outcomes for women and birthing people aiming for a spontaneous labour and birth. The Cherish team is made up of service-users, maternity improvement campaigners, midwives, obstetricians, statistician, and maternal health researchers.
The Cherish research problem
To make sure that those wanting to labour and birth spontaneously are safe and well supported, it is important that staff have a clear understanding of what a healthy labour and birth should look like. This understanding is essential for the timely recognition of complications should something unexpected happen.
In this programme development project, we aim to contribute to this understanding by answering the following questions:
- What is currently known about the spontaneous physiology of labour, birth and the immediate recovery period?
- What conditions are needed to support women and birthing people who want to achieve spontaneous labour and birth?
- How can participatory research methods be used to investigate these questions?
- How can participatory research methods be used in a full programme for applied research designed to test the co-designed labour and birth support package?
The answers we find to these four questions will be used to inform the co-design of a labour and birth support package to be tested in the future study.
Cherish action timeline
| Timeline | Cherish Stakeholder Advisory Network activities | Evidence synthesis | Care evaluation | Participatory methods |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan-Mar 2024 | Cherish support package feedback event | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| February - March 2024 | N/A | Submission of sythesis article. Completion of mata synthesis for evidence map | Completion of evaluation | Submission of co-design article |
| April - May 2024 | Newsletter and open Q&A | Submission of evidence map article | Submission of evaluation article | N/A |
| May - Sept 2024 | N/A | Formation of Cherish 2 research team, co-design and submission of Cherish 2 application. | ||
Learn more about the Cherish Stakeholder Advisory Network (SAN) and the themes identified in our work.
If these are things that are important to you and you are interested in joining our stakeholder advisory network, please contact us at Cherish@city.ac.uk.
