The ASPIRE Covid-19 Study
The ASPIRE COVID-19 study examined how maternity services changed during the COVID-19 pandemic and what this means for parents, families and healthcare staff going forward.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the ways in which many NHS Trusts provide maternity care in the UK, especially by reducing face-to-face and community care. In the Netherlands, some healthcare organisations took a different approach and increased the amount of community care. This study looked at these approaches to better understand the challenges of providing safe and personalised maternity care during the pandemic, and what lessons can be applied to planning for potential future crises.
The researchers reviewed documents and asked parents, family members, healthcare staff, policy makers and charities, including Sands, about their experiences of using and delivering maternity services during the COVID-19 pandemic, both in the UK and the Netherlands. In the UK, seven different NHS Trusts were used as case studies. All of these experiences were analysed to give a picture of how maternity care changed during the pandemic and what this meant for providing safe and personalised care for women and their families. Sands supported the research study to make sure that the perspectives of bereaved parents and families were considered throughout, and took part by providing evidence of how the pandemic affected care for bereaved parents and families.
The findings informed ten policy recommendations to highlight what needs to be considered in future plans, emphasising the need to ensure that parents, partners and families are never routinely excluded from maternity and neonatal care, even in a crisis, and that there are enough staff with manageable workloads to give them time to provide personalised care.
The research team developed an online hub to collect and share information on how best to design and develop maternity services after the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure safe and personalised care. The hub also contains everything produced by the ASPIRE research study itself.
More Information
Why do we need this research?
UK policy states that every family should have access to for safe maternity care that can be personalised to their needs. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic maternity care underwent significant changes in the UK, with an increase in virtual appointments, decrease in visits by community midwives, rules put in place limiting who could attend in-person appointments or scans and reduced visiting on postnatal wards and neonatal units.
In the Netherlands, a different set of approaches were used that focused on maintaining (as far as possible) community maternity services during the COVID-19 pandemic. By exploring these different approaches in the UK and the Netherlands, the study aims to find out how best to provide care for mothers, babies, and partners during and after a pandemic. As the changes made during the pandemic continue to affect experiences of maternity care today, this research provides useful information about how to ensure safe and personalised care in similar situations - especially where there are staff shortages and an increased use of virtual appointments.
What were the aims of this study?
The overarching aim of the study was to find out how maternity services can provide safe and personalised care to all mothers, babies and families during future crises. As part of this, the research team wanted to establish how and why the different approaches to providing maternity care were taken in the UK and the Netherlands during the COVID-19 pandemic and how these choices affected experiences of women using maternity services and staff working within them. A final set of recommendations for how maternity and neonatal services can function most effectively were developed with input from women, families, healthcare professionals, policy makers and other third sector organisations.
What did the researchers do?
The research team reviewed relevant documents from organisations (including Sands) to record their responses to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, including guidelines, reports and advice. They also gathered the views of women, families, healthcare professionals and organisational staff through surveys and interviews, across both the UK and the Netherlands. For the UK study, seven cases studies from different Trusts will be explored in detail, with more interviews being carried out and clinical data being collected, to get an in-depth comparison of different approaches to maternity care during the COVID-19 pandemic within the UK. The analysis of these case studies is still being finalised.
The data was analysed to work out how changes to maternity services caused by COVID-19 had positive and negative impacts, how this changed over time and whether the approaches taken by organisations were effective in dealing with these. This analysis formed the basis of policy recommendations that can be used by organisations and policy-makers to help them deliver safe and personalised maternity care in the event of future crises.
Sands were represented on the advisory group for the research study and also took part by providing documents and evidence that highlighted the bereaved parents and families' experiences of maternity services and care during the pandemic.
What did the study find?
The research study showed that it was vital to ensure parents, partners and families are never routinely excluded from maternity and neonatal care, and that there are enough staff with manageable workloads to give them time to provide personalised care, even in future crises. Planning and policy was seen as crucial to achieving these aims, and the study set out ten policy recommendations to highlight what needs to be considered in future plans.
The research team have produced a range of other reports, academic papers, infographics and videos that highlight the experiences of parents and families, healthcare staff and organisations, all of which are part of a hub developed from the project that aims to provide resources to help the effective design and development of maternity services going forward after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Additional information:
Lead researcher – Professor Soo Downe
Institution – UCLan
Funder – Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
Duration – 2020 - 2022
Publications:
All publications and study outputs can be found at the bottom of this page within the ASPIRE Hub site.