Welcome to The Collaborating in Pregnancy and Early Years (CoPE) Project!
We are a group of researchers from the Centre for Maternal and Child Health, City, University of London, who are interested in improving collaboration between healthcare professionals during and after pregnancy. We believe that with better collaboration between healthcare professionals care will be improved for women and their babies. Further, collaboration is needed to deliver public health in the perinatal period and will benefit the most vulnerable families the most.
Our story
COPE began as a PhD project in October 2014. Ros and Ellinor’s PhD student, Ryc, started the project with a systematic literature review of midwives’ and health visitors’ collaboration in maternity services in the UK and internationally. This review found that partnership working is valued by midwives and health visitors, despite the challenges surrounding it. Since then, several qualitative and quantitative studies have been conducted. In 2017 we held our first stakeholder event, which you can read about on the Institute of Health Visiting’s website here.
Overall, our work can be divided into
(i) current practice as experienced by midwives and health visitors
(ii) postnatal women’s views and experiences of their care of transfer of care between midwifery and health visiting
(iii) pre-registration education for midwifery and health visiting students
The latest project publications can be found here. If you want to contact us, email cope@city.ac.uk
We are grateful to all our funders (City, University of London, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forrest Community Practitioner Education Network and Public Health England) and those who have been supporting our team and our work so far:
