Building the evidence for safe obstetric emergency care during the pandemic

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic the Thiscovery team and colleagues at THIS Institute worked together - remotely and at speed - to support maternity professionals in developing new safety procedures. In doing so we also created a new way of working online to involve large numbers of people to design changes or improvements to the way healthcare is delivered.

Participants

105 people: maternity professionals, infection prevention experts and human factors specialists.

Methods

Stimulus video, ideas generation, online consensus-building.

Impact

This project rapidly delivered important support to NHS staff during the early days of the COVID pandemic. The resulting video resource has been viewed over 130,000 times.

Delivered on behalf of:

What we did

Engaged with 105 people including maternity professionals, infection prevention experts and human factors specialists.
Unlocked participants' creativity through a stimulus video followed by prompt questions on how the practices shown could be improved - resulting in more than 800 ideas.
Supported analysis to rationalise 800 suggestions down to 22 of the most frequently mentioned.
Gathered consensus by asking participants to score the ideas, and then re-review the recommendations where agreement wasn't clear after seeing other groups' scores.

Key insights

The project generated crucial insights for maternity staff early on in the pandemic, including recommendations on:

1

The use and wear of protective equipment.

2

The design of spaces to support infection prevention.

3

The importance of clarity in communication.

Improvement in action

The insights collected were rapidly translated into practical tools for maternity staff - an instructional video, an infographic and an information sheet.

Significantly the project also resulted in an important new approach to working with large numbers of people online to design new ways of doing things, using a modification of a method called the ‘Delphi consensus-building approach’. This technique has been used many times on Thiscovery since 2020 to support improvement and innovation in health and care.