McTempo Angus Home Birth Project: a pilot study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Models of Care: The Effects on Maternal and Perinatal Outcomes (McTempo) – Angus Home Birth Project: a pilot study
IRAS ID
233254
Contact name
Vera Feruza Nuritova
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Dundee
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 5 months, 1 days
Research summary
Planned home births are consistently well-evaluated, but incorporating this service into overall maternity service provision is challenging. Within Tayside the number of home births has consistently been low: there were just 12 in 2015, a rate of 0.28%. Providing continuity of midwifery carer, a feature which can help promote planned home birth, can be difficult to achieve within the current service provision models. There is growing evidence that continuity of carer and planned home birth are associated with improved Clinical, Psychosocial and Organisational (CPO) outcomes. To support the ambition to address implementation of the current evidence base, a pilot model of maternity care has been implemented in Angus which offers continuity of carer with planned home birth for low risk women.
This pilot project consists of a dedicated homebirth team in Angus with a specific aim of increasing the home birth rate to 3% over 18 months (i.e. 30 home births) and to reach an 80% target of single continuity of carer across the childbirth continuum (i.e. seeing the same midwife for at least 80% of contact visits throughout pregnancy, birth and the post period). Within the project a model of flexible, woman-centred care is employed providing evidence based choice and continuity of carer for women.
We will analyse clinical case note data to assess uptake of the project and the extent to which women in the project achieve the 80% target of single continuity of carer. The project will also use focus groups with service users and providers in Angus in an exploration of their perceptions of the Home Birth project. This project develops existing work using focus groups which use as their basis the Quality Maternal and Newborn Care (QMNC) Framework published in The Lancet Series on Midwifery (Renfrew et al. 2014). This well-evidenced Framework, which describes the features of quality care, has been used to inform revised international benchmarks for antenatal care (WHO 2016) and the Scottish Government’s recent (2017) review of maternity and newborn care (‘The Best Start’). Through our existing work conducting twelve focus groups with service users and providers (the analysis is nearly complete) we have established that this framework provides a robust basis on which to assess the extent to which quality care is being given. We will use this to evaluate the Angus Home Birth project.REC name
East of Scotland Research Ethics Service REC 1
REC reference
17/ES/0116
Date of REC Opinion
18 Sep 2017
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion