Resilient Maternity Care v1.0
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Adaptive performance of midwives as a Resilience mechanism to improve safety in maternity services: a multiple case, qualitative embedded design case study.
IRAS ID
321241
Contact name
Rachael Martin
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Staffordshire University
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 7 months, 30 days
Research summary
Despite media attention on safety in maternity services, little progress has been made towards improvement. This may be because healthcare is complex and involves lots of factors which interact continually, including different people (staff and patients), equipment and ways of working. It is difficult to identify one thing which causes harm to patients, because many factors are connected. It is also difficult to fix specific problems because any intervention may cause unplanned effects somewhere else in the maternity service, causing problems for other staff or patients, or causing different safety concerns.
Another way to look at safety is to consider how everyday work is done, rather than looking only at when things have gone wrong. The Resilience Engineering view is that people change the way they work to meet the conditions that they are working in. People find new ways to do things or work around problems to make sure that the job gets done and the service keeps running smoothly. This suggests that supporting midwives to work more flexibly could make maternity care safer, but so far this has not been tested in maternity services.
This project wants to learn what stops midwives from doing their job and if or how they can change what they do to overcome these problems. The project also wants to know how midwives being flexible can make maternity care safer. This work will watch midwives at work on the Labour Ward at two hospitals to see how they change what they do and ask the reasons why. It will also ask managers how they support midwives to be flexible to the day-to-day working conditions.
REC name
East Midlands - Nottingham 1 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
23/EM/0034
Date of REC Opinion
11 Apr 2023
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion