Projects include:

Exploratory review of the home birth service at Birmingham Women's NHS Foundation Trust: Reviewed at year 1, 2 and 3.

Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust (BWNFT) introduced a new caseload homebirth service (HBS) in 2014 to provide women with this as a realistic option. In autumn 2014 the CLAHRC Maternity and Child Health team did what we call an ‘evaluability assessment’ of this service which captured a ‘snapshot’ of what was happening. By looking at the original Service plans, and talking to those involved we looked at current practice with respect to what the HBS is, what it does, how it relates to other services, any barriers or facilitators to it working, and the data that is (or could be) used to evaluate it. We have fed back findings to the service and will do the same process each year to capture the ‘story’ of the HBS as it evolves over time. We will work with Birmingham Women’s Hospital to assess whether the process had any impact on the development of the homebirth service

Home birth exploratory review: Comparing framework qualitative analysis with a rapid analysis approach

The CLAHRC Maternity and Child Health’s recent Review of the Home Birth Service at BWNFT involved talking to those involved and looking at Service documents: we call this qualitative data. The traditional ways this type of data is analysed are lengthy as it takes time to interpret the information and finalise conclusions. This may mean that by the time we give the results to those involved they are out of date and therefore of limited use. We have therefore used a new and quicker way of looking at the data but we don’t know whether it gives the same findings. This project will compare the newer rapid analysis we did in late 2014 with the more traditional widely-used, lengthy approach, called Framework analysis. An independent researcher will look again at the original Review data using a Framework approach, and we will compare the two ways both in terms of the time taken to do them as well as the conclusions each gives.Keywords: Maternity, Maternity Services, Methodology, Service Evaluation, Rapid Analysis.