Quantifying Baby Lifeline's impact on parents and babies

 

The Approach

Systems Thinking helped us to understand how Baby Lifeline’s interventions fit into the maternity care landscape and their potential impacts on families. 

Extensive research into NHS data, media reports, academic papers and the charities own research reports in order to gain a rich picture of the problem, especially the scope and limitations of available data. 

Creating simple spreadsheet models, based on simplified assumptions, helped to define quantifiable mechanisms by which the charity could influence outcomes for families. We refined our assumptions and models buy extracting data from the NHS data sets and other research papers, always cognisant of the limitations of the data, i.e. confounding variables, data gaps, inconsistent definitions and time lags. 

We used excel-based data visualisations (charts and graphs) for replicability.

The Client

Baby Lifeline’s mission is to make care safer and better for every pregnant woman, pregnant person, and newborn baby all over the UK and worldwide. It does this by supporting and working with NHS professionals at the heart of care – buying equipment, developing and providing critical training and conducting research.   

The Client's Problem

Baby Lifeline had no way of quantifying the impact of its work on parents and babies. Robust and compelling measures, demonstrating the impact of their interventions on reducing harm would help the charity to raise awareness and secure additional funding. 

The Solution

• The multitude of sources and official statistics in a clearly referenced and timestamped single database 
• Logical, dynamic impact models that can be easily updated  
• A framework for developing additional impact models as new data arises 
• A long list of additional hypotheses to be investigated 

The Benefits