Digital Health and Care Wales are leading on the Digital Maternity Cymru programme to digitally transform maternity services in Wales. As part of this programme, we spoke with women and birthing people who use maternity services to understand their needs around digital services.
Currently, the maternity service in Wales relies heavily on paper-based clinical records.
Introducing digital maternity records can improve maternity services by:
- supporting and improving the partnership between women and birthing people and the clinicians supporting their maternity care
- allowing professionals to spend more time caring for women and birthing people by reducing the time spent on duplicating data
- making sure records are accessible for all professionals who provide care across Wales
- creating consistency across Wales with all maternity records recorded in the same way
- enabling better reporting of outcome data
We set up a multidisciplinary team with representatives from Digital Health and Care Wales and NHS Wales health boards while we supported with user research and service design expertise.
Impact
Recommendations from the Digital Maternity Cymru discovery are used to inform future delivery decisions, in relation to developing a Wales-wide, user-centred, digital maternity service across Wales, which leads to improved service experiences and health outcomes for women and birthing people.
We have a better understanding of women and birthing people’s digital maternity service needs, including those from seldom heard groups. This has led to recommendations to enhance their maternity journey on the digital records system.
The recommendations aim to create the right conditions for a supportive, inclusive and easy to use digital entry point and referral journey for the digital maternity service.
Recommendations regarding the provision of information aim to ensure information is accessible, easy to understand, and tailored to women and birthing people’s needs during every pregnancy stage, particularly for touch points between antenatal appointments. Furthermore, we've made recommendations for service interactions around antenatal and postnatal appointments, aiming to improve service experiences.
The Digital Maternity Cymru programme team have a greater awareness and proven confidence in applying user-centred design, and Agile methodologies and techniques and seek to develop these further through skills and training.
Where appropriate, recommendations and lessons learned are applied across other health service areas to support good practice and continue to improve user experiences more widely.
Next steps
The recommendations are fully considered by Digital Health and Care Wales and will be used to support the delivery of the Digital Maternity Cymru programme.
CDPS will meet with Digital Health and Care Wales to consider future support and opportunities available and continue to offer guidance and advice, as required, as the Digital Maternity Cymru programme advances in its delivery.
Hear from our partners
"Digital transformation has the potential to revolutionise women's and birthing people's health. However, there is also a risk of harm and further marginalising or excluding disadvantaged women, due to assumptions made during the design process.
Our collaboration with CDPS represents a commitment to a user-centric design philosophy, ensuring that the voices and needs of all women and birthing people, especially those from seldom-heard groups, are heard and addressed.
Through this process, we have unearthed opportunities to enhance the overall experience, alleviate anxieties, and foster empowerment through the introduction of a dependable, easily accessible digital maternity record. This initiative is poised to equip individuals with the knowledge to make informed, evidence-based decisions throughout their healthcare journey.
By taking a user-centred design approach and focusing on the unique needs of those facing the greatest health disparities, maternity services aims to positively impact the health and well-being of women and birthing people in Wales."
Read more
Including seldom heard voices in user research
User research identifies need for digital maternity notes
How it meets our objectives
CDPS’s objectives:
Objective 1: Supporting the leadership and culture amongst public service leaders to drive good digital policy making and support digital transformation.
Objective 2: Support others to ensure that people can access digital public services by helping them create services that are designed around user needs.
The Five Ways of Working – Well-being of Future Generations Act
- Long-term
- Integration
- Involvement
- Collaboration
- Prevention
7 well-being goals – Well-being of Future Generations Act
- A healthier Wales
- A more equal Wales
- A Wales of more cohesive communities
- A Wales of vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language
- A globally responsible Wales