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 voices of women and their caregivers are often overlooked in the planning, testing, and implementation of quality improvement initiatives. As a result, projects frequently fall short of achieving their outcomes, and the proposed change ideas fail to adequately address the needs of the intended end-users or patients. Implemented over the last three years in Lagos and Kaduna States, Nigeria, Project Aisha has been leveraging women’s voices to tackle barriers to safe childbirth.

This session will demonstrate the importance of incorporating the voices of women and health professionals in improving quality care via in-person and digital health (NaviHealth.ai) solutions. This integrated approach was successful in reducing maternal deaths and obstetric complications while focusing on sustainability, spread, and scale from the beginning of the project.

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 to collect and act on patient feedback, improve quality of care, enhance operational efficiency, and improve overall patient experience. 


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


• Take away practical examples of how improvements in maternal health processes have led to improved health outcomes providing opportunities for adoption or adaptation of these learnings in their settings.

Kendra Njoku Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI); USA

Chiagozie Abiakam Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI); USA

Maureen Tshabalala Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI); USA