'Great Expectations' for poster at national conference

Members of a team of healthcare professionals, who run the ‘Great Expectations’ programme for parents-to-be, were invited to attend the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Conference last month.

Leeshia Walton, Midwife and Great Expectations Co-ordinator and Jan Potter, Health Improvement Manager, who are employed by Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust and Plymouth Community Healthcare, were selected to present a poster to the NICE Shared Learning Collection on their submission: Plymouth Great Expectations Antenatal Education Programme.

Their work was selected from more than 70 submitted to the 2014 Shared Learning Awards and was one of 20 projects to have been chosen as part of the Shared Learning poster display at the NICE conference, which was held at the Birmingham International Convention Centre on 13th and 14th May 2014.

The Great Expectations' poster was highly commended.

Leeshia said: “It was great to be able to showcase our work, we are delighted that NICE has acknowledged the programme as an example of best practice. We were honoured to attend the NICE conference as representatives of our partnership working with Plymouth City Council”

Great Expectations is an antenatal education programme for pregnant women and their partners/supporters. It is broken down into six weekly sessions, which follow the chronology of a pregnancy and birth. This starts with key aspects of a healthy pregnancy such as not smoking, nutrition, emotional attachment and activity and goes right through to ’10 days and beyond’, the healthy child programme.

Feedback is a key part of the programme and the feedback collected and evaluated has demonstrated that women and their partners/supporters feel more informed about the benefits of a healthier lifestyle and how this can impact on the health and development of their baby. They also feel more prepared to make informed choices about their pregnancy and birth. The parents and supporters also reported feeling more confident about being with their baby and responding to their needs, after the course.