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.

  

Find out more about what we do and our plans for the future in our research strategy.