Making progress in a time of challenge - IDM 2022
This International Day of the Midwife, Flora Khan, patient experience midwife at Newham Hospital, reflects on the progress our midwifery team has made during the pandemic to better improve the experience of women and birthing people in our local community.
Making sure women and families' voices are heard
“Throughout the pandemic, we maintained a high standard of care for women and babies and continued to work closely with our local Maternity Voice Partnership (MVP) to make sure women and families' voices are heard. Through this partnership, and by actively listening to both patient and staff feedback, we have been able to identify areas for improvement within our maternity unit and have created working groups to improve these pathways.
“All of the areas these groups focus on are co-designed with women, families and a wide range of staff, as well as our local MVP chair.
“An example of a pathway we improving as a result of feedback is induction of labour (IOL). We created a dedicated IOL working group in partnership with doctors where we look at both the information provided to women about IOL and their experience with the pathway. So far, we have launched weekly, virtual sessions so that women and their birth partners can get a better understanding of the IOL process and provide an opportunity for them to ask any questions they may have with the support of our midwives. These sessions have been really well received and have really allowed us to gain a better insight into the experience of women and birth partners with our IOL pathway. We are currently reviewing the pathway in order to identify and address further areas for improvement.
“We also have a triage pathway working group, where we are going to implement a system called Birmingham Symptom-specific Obstetric Triage System (BSOTS). This system will help reduce waiting times in our maternity triage and will help us to maintain high levels of safety in this area.”
Overcoming challenges to provide care
“Although the pandemic was a big challenge for the team, we showed resilience and adaptability by re-designing the layout of our antenatal and postnatal wards to create the maternity admissions ward. This was a "hot" ward where we continued to provide excellent antenatal and postnatal care for women who were Covi-19 positive or for whom we didn’t know their Covid-19 status. This has now closed but at the time, we were the only unit in north east London to do this.
“We also offered universal screening for women and birth partners for Covid-19, and have maintained birth partner support for women throughout the pandemic by testing partners.
“In 2019, we set-up a birth trauma resolution clinic run by our specially trained midwives, for women and birth partners who experience birth trauma. We extended this during the pandemic to treat staff who witnessed this trauma and were affected by it. We also provided wellbeing support for staff throughout the pandemic, including psychological support.”
‘I am so proud of everything we’ve achieved’
“It’s amazing to think of the progress that’s been made in the field of midwifery over the last 100 years. And, even though the past two years have been very challenging for midwives, it’s amazing to see that we’re still moving forwards and making progress.
We’ve overcome numerous challenges but have come out stronger, all while continuing to provide a high standard of care for women, birthing people, their babies and their families at Newham Hospital.
“I’m so proud of everything we’ve achieved together as a team and can’t wait to see what progress we make now and over the next 100 years.”
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