In partnership with the NHS in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough

Challenge

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Integrated Care System (ICS), through their Local Maternity & Neonatal System set up a project called Empowering Digital Access in Maternity Services.

The project aimed to empower pregnant women and persons to be able to use digital services to give them better access to information. But without action, digital inequalities within the maternity service will remain and will only likely widen as the digital agenda grows.

Solution

By understanding the barriers that exist amongst this population group, it enabled appropriate and targeted actions to be put in place to support the reduction of digital inequalities within maternity services.

Healthwave supported the ICS with community engagement that yielded high quality, rapid, actionable research.

"As part of our digital inequality pioneer programme, we wanted to better understand the current barriers that contribute to pregnant people not using digital services. Healthwave helped us to frame the right research question and engage with a representative group of people across our region. Through their engagement efforts, they gathered survey data and themes which we were able to feed into our digital agenda, as well as feeding back into the national maternity transformation programme. One of the major findings was the barrier around young mums being able to access mobile data services, which presented a barrier to them engaging with the local digital maternity offer.

Healthwave's engagement work helped us identify a real gap in our local maternity service offering that we could address through a new digital strategy. We are now working together with them to develop this strategy further and ensure that everyone can easily access the services they need, when they need them". Caroline Saywood, Local Maternity & Neonatal System Digital Midwife, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough ICS