Co-creating a resource for promoting a community, life-course approach to maternal listening​
As many as one in five women will experience mental health issues in the perinatal period but current services and online pathways are not designed for supporting the diverse needs of women when it comes to navigating emotional wellbeing during pregnancy. For some communities, accessing maternal mental health care can be difficult and there are additional barriers for women experiencing complex social factors and health inequalities and deprivation. These challenges are compounded with the push for digitising NHS pathways and the increasing reliance on digital technologies in maternal health (i.e. NHS pregnancy app).
Listening deeply to the seldom heard voices of women facing these challenges, understanding these barriers, learning about stories of hope and exploring gaps and opportunities to meet their needs helps us to champion the rights of all women, and think differently about how services and tools are designed and offered. Our proposed study builds on our previous work in which we conducted a series of workshops with 12 mums/mums-to-be, including those who had experienced homelessness, the asylum system, criminal justice system, from LGBTQ+ communities, Black and Brown mums and mums who were neurodivergent. The workshops were co-facilitated with our VCSE partners, which included a local peer-led organisation that supports mums/mums-to-be. The workshops aimed to understand challenges for accessing maternal care services from a holistic perspective: we focused on understanding the multiple and interconnected factors that could prevent participants from accessing services and affect digital inclusion. Workshops activities included collage and zine making together with story sharing in a safe place.
This new project will explore ways of working together and advance our previous scoping project on maternal mental health. It will support the co-production of research dissemination and impact through the making of resource materials for promoting listening and raising awareness about maternal mental health. The co-created resources (animation and posters) will communicate key needs whilst disseminating participants’ stories captured in our workshops about maternal mental health. Together, we will explore the power of storytelling and audio-visual means for translation work whilst raising awareness and promoting listening with communities whose voices may be unheard or excluded from the system.
Our overarching aim is two-fold: to bring our VCSE partners’ ideas (i.e. an animation) for dissemination to life whilst providing an opportunity to collectively think about ways of creating meaningful impact in community-based participatory design projects. We will address the following:
- How can we leverage the power of storytelling and creative media to amplify marginalised voices and communicate diverse needs whilst reaching out to people with lower levels of health literacy?
- How can participatory design processes support best practice for co-producing research dissemination and maximising impact in community-based projects?
- What is the potential of co-created research outputs for key stakeholders to co-envision actionable steps towards systematic changes?
We hope that the co-created resources can serve as a catalyst to evidence needs for more community-led research, particularly with regards to further address equity and informing the design of services and online pathways for maternal mental health.
Team
Caroline Claisse – Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction and Interaction Design at Open Lab, Newcastle University.
Sarah Penn – Board Director, The Happy Mums Foundation