Kilkenny hospital scoops coveted award

St Luke's General Hospital's Maternity Department has been selected for a Bright Spark National Innovation Award in the Best Nursing & Midwifery Project category for their 'Muma Postnatal Hub' service.

"We’re delighted to win this award. It’s a huge support to the women who give birth in our hospital," Ann Margaret Hogan, Director of Midwifery at St Luke’s General Hospital said.

"It also showcases the expertise we have within the team in St Luke’s. We’re very lucky to have such an enthusiastic and expert staff," she added.

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The new service, which was commissioned by the National Women and Infants Health Programme (NWIHP), is designed to pivot around the needs of women, promote early intervention and signpost to additional services in the postnatal period.

The local midwifery team saw this as a great opportunity to engage in human-centred design and to embrace a new way of working, engaging with the expertise of designers to implement this new service.

The team used journey maps and empathy maps to identify what the problems were that needed to be addressed by this new service; this allowed them to develop an innovative service to include support, advice and signposting on postnatal services available to mothers and their families both in the hospital and the community.

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