Children’s Health and Maternity programme

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National programme
Funded 2020 — extended to June 2025

Children’s Health and Maternity Programme

Alongside ARC Yorkshire and Humber, we’re leading this national programme of work to improve health outcomes in childhood and maternal health across the country.

We are leading the development of a research programme in Children’s Health and Maternity in collaboration with the following ARCs: Yorkshire and Humber, North East and North Cumbria, North Thames, North West Coast, Northwest London, South London, West and West Midlands.

This collaboration builds on the ARC network’s world-leading expertise in children’s and maternal health, and existing local and national networks, to best understand how research can contribute to meaningful change.

This programme of research seeks to find effective ways to implement evidence-based interventions to improve children’s and maternity services widely across England by supporting four implementation projects. The programme was initially funded for three years but has now been extended by 18 months, until June 2025. This has enabled each project to complete further research, resources and outputs.

The programme supports four implementation projects across the ARC network and is conducting a cross-project study exploring how teams support the implementation of evidence-based interventions in child health and maternity services.

Prioritisation process

Through our collaborative prioritisation process, we prioritised four key implementation projects:

ESMI-III: The Effectiveness and Implementation of Maternal Mental Health Services

BRUSH (optimising toothBrushing pRogrammes in nUrseries and ScHools)

Trauma-focused Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for children in care

Evaluating models of health-based mateRnIty Violence Advisor (RIVA) provision in maternity services

Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE)

In support of the projects’ Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) we established a Community of Practice (CoP) to create a space for the projects’ academic PPIE leads, public partners and programme PPIE staff to share knowledge, resources, and experiences. We hope that working in this way will help to achieve individual project goals as well as collectively contributing to new learning for the community, building capacity in PPIE leadership and developing a network.

PPIE Progress

At initial meetings, the projects’ PPIE leads shared their PPIE practices and identified barriers to involvement and the facilitation of shared knowledge spaces, especially around sensitive subjects. We discussed the complexity of public involvement regarding the context of the research and the diversity of the people involved.

CoP members identified that there is a lack of pragmatic guidance around sensitive topics within involvement spaces, and that consequently valuable learning could be highlighted from our work and the experiences of public partners and researchers.

We are now conducting an evaluation of the PPIE work across all four projects that aims to describe how to work collaboratively with public partners in a safe and sensitive way, and critically evaluate the CoP approach so others may learn from our experience.

“[I need] to give credit to the community of practice itself, and say how incredibly useful this forum is being for sharing practice and ideas and providing support. I think that communication is incredibly important and needed for PPIE, and you just can’t do it without people.”

Kara Gray-Burrows, Principal Investigator, BRUSH

Implementing evidence-based interventions

We are conducting a cross-project study to explore how programme teams support and influence the implementation of evidence-based interventions in child health and maternity services. Key questions include:

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What strategies programme teams use to help project sites overcome implementation challenges

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Whether that support has a positive influence on implementation

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How PPIE is used to support implementation

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Whether effective strategies are likely to be feasible for other projects

We are completing long-form interviews with programme leads at the beginning, middle and end of the four respective projects, and monthly short interviews with programme team members. Findings from the short interviews are summarised in ‘lightning reports’ and fed back to programme teams on a regular basis to inform ongoing implementation support.

We will perform a comparative analysis of the data, informed by the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR), and synthesise learning across all four implementation projects to learn generalisable lessons about the support needed for effective implementation.

Immediate benefit: generalisable findings about how programme teams can best support implementation, fed back in real time via lightning reports.

Longer-term benefit: cross-project synthesis of learning to improve future implementation efforts in child health and maternity settings across England.

Project outputs

All four supported projects are completing in 2025 and will be producing outputs and resources. We are particularly keen to hear from academics, healthcare providers and commissioners who are interested in our work. Please contact us with any questions or to subscribe to our mailing list.

Programme newsletters

Related publications

Links and downloads

Research team

The programme is co-led by ARC South West and ARC Yorkshire and Humber. The following ARC South West staff contributed to the programme:

Dr Gretchen Bjornstad

Senior Research Fellow / Programme Manager

Professor Stuart Logan

Director of PenARC and Methods for Research and Improvement Theme Lead

Naomi Morley

Research Associate

Amy Bond