A pregnancy app designed by a team from Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is to be adopted across the NHS.
The Mum & Baby app was created by Sunita Sharma, consultant obstetrician at the trust, and co-designed with mothers and partners, midwives, doctors, health visitors, mental health specialists, physiotherapists and infant feeding leads from across North West London.
Originally developed by Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and its charity CW+ with specialist healthcare app developers Imagineear, the app has evolved in partnership with the North West London Local Maternity System and is now in its fourth version.
It is now being adopted by other Local Maternity Systems across England including the Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West Integrated Care System (BOB ICS).
Sharma said: “The Mum & Baby app shows how clinicians can innovate and harness digital technology to empower patients and their families.
“Over the last four years, we have been able to co-design the app to enhance and adapt to meet the needs of women and their families.
“We’re thrilled that more women across the country can now benefit from the clinician-validated information in the Mum & Baby app, which also encourages them to make personal care plans and provides them with locally relevant health and wellbeing information.”
Through the app, women can choose their maternity service providers based on their preferences, refer themselves to the maternity service using the online self-referral form, have information guiding them through different stages of pregnancy, and develop their digital personalised care plans for pregnancy, birth and the postnatal period, which they can share with their maternity team to enhance better communication and shared decision-making.
The app also provides links to local children centres and services that they can access.
Helen Maric, North West London maternity transformation programme lead, added: “We are delighted that more women across the UK can now download the locally-tailored, clinician-validated, evidenced-based Mum & Baby app. The growing adoption of the app illustrates the transformative power of clinician-user collaborations in improving the care of pregnant women and new mothers.
“We hope that more and more local maternity services across the UK want to share the app with their patients.”
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