Thanks to your donations, Leeds Hospitals Charity is supporting a ground-breaking research study for mums-to-be in the city. The ‘Born and Bred in’ (BaBi) Leeds project will see midwives asking pregnant women in Leeds to consent to become part of BaBi Leeds. The project will mean health researchers will join together lots of health information so that they can build up a much clearer picture of people’s lives and look at ways to improve inequalities, health and care through research and planning of services in Leeds. They will be asking every pregnant woman in Leeds to join the project.

 

The project is modelled on the very successful study from ‘Born in Bradford’ called BiB4All, an important new study that is embedded into the maternity care record in Bradford. It builds on the success of the Born in Bradford (BiB) programme over the last 12 years and aims to create a learning health intelligence tool focused on early life for generations to come. BiB4All and BaBi Leeds aim to harness the power of routinely collected data from multiple services and organisations to build a clearer picture of children’s and families lives over time. Once connected, the data will be used by researchers, in collaboration with local services and commissioners, to help improve health, care and services through research and planning.

 

Over £60,000 of funding from the charity will be used to recruit a dedicated research midwife for the project, as well as fund development to the electronic systems that will be used to store the patient data. The first stage of the project is for community midwives working across Leeds to be trained before the recruitment of pregnant women begins.

 

Kate Robinson, Senior Research Midwife and Manager of the Reproductive Health and Childbirth Research Team at Leeds Teaching Hospitals is one of the NHS staff leading the BaBi Leeds project. She says “It’s fantastic to have received this funding as we really believe this project has the ability to improve healthcare for pregnant women and their babies across Leeds. Being able to link data like this is a fantastic opportunity. It means we can use this data to analyse the current health trends for maternity and early years care in the city and see where we might be able to make improvements. We’re really excited about getting this project underway.”