Co-production · King’s College London / Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust; funded by Evelina London Children’s Charity
Co-Producing Improvement in Care: Preterm Birth Photovoice
““What would you like other people to know and understand about these experiences?” - project invitation”
The challenge
Preterm birth research needed to capture experiences that clinical records and interviews alone can miss
Preterm birth can involve uncertainty, neonatal care, difficult clinical encounters, changes to identity and family life, recovery, loss and long-term emotional effects. Much of this is hard to communicate through standard questionnaires or one-off interviews. The project also needed a method that could create dialogue between women who had experienced preterm birth and the staff delivering maternity and neonatal care.
What we did
Women and staff are using photography, storytelling and co-analysis to explore care from both sides
Open Routes Research is coordinating the photovoice strand of the Co-Producing Improvement in Care study. Women are introduced to photography and photovoice, take images between workshops, discuss those images through photo-elicitation and develop captions explaining what they want others to understand. Staff take part in a parallel reflective process using participant-generated images and their own creative responses. Participants will then contribute to collective analysis, interpretation and curation of the final outputs.
What changed
Participant-generated images will move directly into service reflection, research outputs and a public exhibition
The study is still in progress. Its design gives women and staff a direct role in deciding which experiences and messages become visible, how photographs are interpreted and what service-improvement questions they raise. Selected images and captions will feed into academic analysis, staff reflection, teaching and service-improvement activity, alongside a public and online exhibition co-curated with participants.
Outputs
Photovoice workshops; participant photographs and captions; patient and staff co-analysis; academic publication; public exhibition; online gallery