Midwives' evaluation of their role in crowdsourcing activities to improve the maternity experience: part 1

Abstract

This is the first of two articles introducing crowdsourcing as a tool that offers creative solutions to address everyday challenges in maternity care. In this first article, crowdsourcing is defined and discussed, demonstrating how it can be used to discover many relatively low-cost ideas to improve maternity services. By engaging service users in crowdsourcing activities, quality improvement is shared and focused on issues that emerge from practice. This process has the potential to generate more innovative ways to improve maternity services and women's experiences of care. In the second article, the discussion will centre on a service evaluation project that studied midwives' involvement in a workshop as part of a quality improvement project.