Building on work during 2022/23 the PEPI Team supported maternity services to carry out further engagement and involvement around key areas of Best Start strategy development. This focused on better understanding the experiences of women who had given birth over a 12-month period where NHSGGC invited over 12,000 women to share their experiences of birth, with a sub focus on Continuity of Carer. The Continuity of Carer Experience Engagement Project was developed in partnership between NHSGGC Project Midwife and the PEPI Team. The aim was to better understand the maternity care experiences of women, via a survey distributed via text message. The survey targeted users of the BadgerNet app, seeking to enhance the Continuity of Carer within NHSGGC’s maternity services. A total of 2,889 responses were received. The survey was accessible in five languages: Arabic, English, Polish, Romanian and Urdu, with key findings being used by the project team to develop enhancements to Continuity of Carer across NHSGGC maternity services.
This programme of work provided valuable information to inform ongoing improvements in NHSGGC’s maternity and neonatal strategy, aiming to align service provision more closely with patient needs and expectations. Improvements directly influenced and triggered from this work focused on improving Continuity of Carer through the implementation of a caseload holding model to ensure continuous care from the same healthcare providers throughout pregnancy. The work also led to the development of a new recurring feedback survey for maternity services and moved forward key thinking around how we capture more diverse maternity experiences in line with good practice emerging from National Perinatal Network activity. As well as the above, the learning from deploying a multi-language survey has proven invaluable in shaping the PEPI Team’s thinking and approach to future applications of multi-language surveys. The Continuity of Carer Engagement Project’s innovative approach and significant impact were recognised as it became a finalist for the UK Patient Experience Network National Awards (PENNA). This recognition helped raise awareness of the work amongst others, leading to further sharing of the work at the National Maternity Conference, helping to inform national developments and facilitated shared learning with maternity teams across the country.