Hello and welcome to the October update!

In September members of the team presented various papers relating to the COPE project in a number of conferences. Ellinor presented two posters at the Society for Reproductive and Infant Psychology conference (York), entitled “Thinking outside the box: Health visitors’ views of enablers to successful collaboration with midwives”, and “Women’s experiences and views of the continuity of information received and shared by midwives and health visitors”. Ryc presented a talk at the Division of Health Psychology conference (Cardiff), entitled, “‘People call them corridor moments don’t they?’ Barriers and enablers to midwife-health visitor collaboration using the Theoretical Domains Framework”.

We are happy to announce that Ellinor will be presenting a poster at the UK Society for Behavioural Medicine conference on the combined findings concerning midwife-health visitor collaboration in December.

Until then,
– Team COPE

Hello and welcome to the September update!

It has been a very busy month for us. First off, data collection for the focus group study with recent mothers has recently been completed, and data analysis is well underway. We will report more on this in due course. Second, we were delighted to have been participants in this year’s #HVWeek, where we wrote a little blog post on the role of electronic communication in facilitating collaborative working between midwives and health visitors. A summary of #HVweek is on Storify (Credit to Julie Cooper of the IHV for the link).

This September we are busy with conferences, with Ryc presenting at the Division of Health Psychology conference, Ellinor at the Society for Reproductive and Infant Psychology conference, and Ros at the International Collaboration for Community Health Nursing! Looking forward to telling you all about these events in next month’s update.

Until then,
-Team COPE

 

Hello and welcome to the August update!

We hope you are all enjoying the summer holidays.

We are delighted to let you know that the abstracts we submitted to the Society for Reproductive and Infant Psychology (SRIP) have both been accepted as poster presentations. Ellinor will be presenting these in the SRIP conference this September in York. To add to this, the focus group study we reported on in our last blog is well underway. Ryc is recruiting participants (women who have had a child in the UK in the last 18 months) to take part in a study exploring your views and experiences of care as delivered collaboratively by midwives and health visitors. The next session will be held on the 9th of August, at Comet Nursery and Children’s Centre (details below).

Finally, the team are busy getting the word out on the studies concerning COPE. Just a few weeks ago, Ellinor presented the findings of the women’s views study at Positive Birth Conference (https://www.city.ac.uk/events/2017/july/positive-birth-conference-2017). You can browse through all the tweets here.

As ever, we would love to hear from you! Let us know what you think of our blog post, or ask us any questions regarding the COPE project via cope@city.ac.uk.

Until then,
– Team COPE

Hello and welcome to the July update!

COPE event

On Wednesday 21^st of June, 2017, we held an event to present and discuss our research findings to date.  In addition to the COPE team (see photo), we had local healthcare professionals and service users attending as well as representatives from the National Childbirth Trust, Royal College of Midwives, Institute of Health Visiting and Community Practitioners and Health Visitors Association. We were very excited to see so many interested individuals attending which lead to great debates on collaboration between healthcare professionals.

After presenting some of our recent research findings we asked the attendees to identify factors that facilitate collaboration between healthcare professionals during and after pregnancy. Table 1 illustrates some of the factors identified. The factors identified to prevent collaboration between healthcare professionals during and after pregnancy are summarised in table 2. Subsequently, we asked the group to vote for the most important enablers and barriers. As can be seen, the group identified computer systems and organisational structure to be key components in collaboration – they could both facilitate and hinder collaboration. Other factors identified were how face-to-face meetings can help collaboration and how the current system where services is provided by different organisations prevents collaboration.

Enablers	Votes
Structure that encourages collaboration	14
Shared computer systems	14
Face-to-face meetings	12
Co-design/production of services	7
Joint strategic leadership	4
Use evidence from Healthy Child Programme and Better Births	4
Less duplication of work	2
Motivation and enthusiasm	2
Funding	1
Local working/caseloads (close geographical proximity)	0
TOTAL	62

Table 1. Factors identified to enable collaboration between healthcare professionals

Barriers	Votes
Work structures/lack of capacity	16
IT systems are different between services	12
Different service providers/fragmented commissioning	10
Information governance/lack of protocol	7
Need to meet targets/KPIs	7
Poor engagement with service users (little feedback from women)	6
No time	2
TOTAL	60

Table 2. Factors identified to prevent collaboration between healthcare professionals.

Finally, the attendees were asked to make suggestions for future research projects and we received lots of good comments.  These are now being discussed within the COPE team, and we will report on them in a future news item. The event evaluated well by the attendees, stating it was good or excellent in our satisfaction survey.