Friday 23 May 2025 | 14:15-15:15

Format: In the round

Stream: People

Content filters: Recommended for those new to quality improvement

PART ONE: Delivering more: why human-centred design methodology is critical in crafting maternal newborn spaces for improved quality of care

Enormous strides have been made to improve global maternal and newborn health, but there is still a long way to go. One overlooked barrier to quality improvement is the built environment. The design of childbirth spaces shape whether families seek care, whether they’re able to access the right care in the right place, and their outcomes and experiences. Over the last three years, IHI and MASS Design Group have engaged mothers, companions, providers, and policymakers to explore how the physical environment impacts the delivery of perinatal care in LMICs. Using our learnings, we redesigned maternal newborn units in Bangladesh and Ethiopia and developed a human-centred toolkit for co-designing safe and respectful birth facilities across global settings. This session will highlight how Human Centred Design (HCD) can be leveraged to understand health-seeking behaviours and identify interventions leading to high quality care for mothers and newborns.

After this session, participants will be able to:

• Recognize how the built environment affects the delivery of safe, effective, and respectful maternal and newborn healthcare (MNH)


• Understand the principles and application of Human-Centred Design toward healthcare facility design


• Apply lessons learned from case studies in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Kenya to their own improvement initiatives

Amie Shao Mass Design Group; USA

Minara Chowdury Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI); USA

Raihan Sharif Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI); USA

 

PART TWO: Not About Me Without Me: Leveraging Women’s Voices to Tackle Barriers to Safe Childbirth using an integrated approach

The session will demonstrate the importance of incorporating the voices of women and health professionals in co-designing digital health solutions, using an integrated approach to reducing maternal deaths and obstetric complications, while focusing on sustainability, spread and scale from the beginning of the project.

This session is critical for healthcare professionals and policymakers committed to leveraging technology, community engagement, quality improvement, and patient-centered design in improving health outcomes.

Following this session, participants will:

• Gain practical insights on how to incorporate the voices of their end-users/patients in tackling health system challenges, and how to leverage technology and AI in closing health system gaps


• Learn how to plan and engage multiple stakeholders to drive sustainability, spread and scale-up of best practices, as well as finding solutions for the challenges they may encounter


• Leave with practical examples of how improvement in maternal health processes have led to improved health outcomes providing opportunities for adoption or adaptation of these learnings in their own settings

Chiagozie Abiakam Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)

Kendra Njoku Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)

Maureen Tshabalala Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI); USA