An exploration of Personalised Maternity Care
Research type
Research Study
Full title
An exploration of Personalised Care within UK maternity services: a longitudinal study.
IRAS ID
329619
Contact name
Louisa Tompkins
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Plymouth
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 1 months, 31 days
Research summary
Many recommendations have been made for increasing Personalisation in the care offered to maternity service users over several decades. The same recommendations occur over time, despite the amount of resources focused on getting this right at each stage. This clearly suggests that there is a barrier between the goals and the paths being taken to try to reach them.
This study will bring together the existing research and summarise the current position through a Scoping review. It will then examine the current local position through a longitudinal, qualitative study, collecting data through interviews. These will be repeated 3 times over the course of 8 months and aim to uncover a deep and rich amount of data relating to the views and experiences of each person relating to infant feeding.
A specific area of care needed to be chosen as a lens through which to focus this view of personalised care, as the entire care period is beyond the scope of this study. Infant feeding has been selected as the lens through which to examine the topic due its nature of being multi-dimensional with elements including physiological, psychological, social and emotional behaviours contained within it.
A longitudinal interview design will be used to capture the way that lived experiences change over time. This will allow a greater understanding of the way services need to be designed to reflect this. This approach will gather data that from each participant in relation to infant feeding and this data will be analysed using qualitative methods in order to really try to understand the complexity behind the term 'Personalised Care'. The study will adopt an innovative qualitative analysis approach and present the data in a networked form, which will help to highlight connections.
REC name
South West - Cornwall & Plymouth Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
24/SW/0094
Date of REC Opinion
3 Sep 2024
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion