Project outputs
Conference presentations
Labour and Birth Conference April 2023
Presentation abstract:
The aim of this UK-based, National Institute for Health and Care Research funded, programme development project, CHERISH, is to carry out the necessary preparatory work needed to test a personalised birth bundle, co-designed by service-users, members of the public, and maternity health care professionals, to improve outcomes for women and birthing people who want a spontaneous labour and birth.
Timely recognition and appropriate responses to complications during the intrapartum and early postnatal period are essential for safe maternity care. Safety demands a thorough understanding of the parameters of spontaneous physiology during labour, birth and the immediate recovery period to enable accurate diagnosis of complications.
Disparities in intervention rates across and between countries, however, indicate a lack of consensus on where normal physiology ends and where pathology, requiring intervention, begins. Clinicians, policy makers and other members of the maternity services improvement community across the world are left struggling, and in some cases fighting, over how to define the safe parameters of spontaneous birth and labour, placing those using the maternity services, along with those providing that service, in a precarious position.
Working as a team of investigators including service-user and public members, obstetricians, midwives and our NHS partners at East Lancashire Hospitals Trust, we have embarked on a participatory project to answer two research questions:
- what is currently known about the parameters of spontaneous physiology during 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?
Here we present the CHERISH methodology which includes the co-design of an evidence map from data collected via a Critical Interpretive Synthesis of the evidence and service/policy evaluation using a Critical Realist Review. Any initial analysis will also be included.
