New funding awarded for second SBRI project!

Welcome to 2024! Here we are at the starting line of another new year; a time of natural reflection on the year that’s just past, and anticipation of the year stretched out ahead. As we get January up and running, The Real Birth Company faces possibly its busiest year to date, as we approach 2024 with hope and excitement for the projects that lay ahead.

Reflection

At the end of 2022, The Real Birth Company was fortunate enough to be awarded Phase 1 funding as part of the SBRI (Small Business and Research Initiative) Healthcare Programme. SBRI is a national award-winning programme that works in partnership with patient groups, government bodies, industry and the NHS. It provides development funding to innovators and entrepreneurs to devise solutions to unmet healthcare needs within the NHS and wider healthcare systems.

2023

2023 saw an intense 6-month project turn that funding into researching, creating, developing and finally the completion and launch of two new ‘Giving Birth to Your Baby Early’ modules (‘Creating an Awareness of Giving Birth Early’ and ‘Giving Birth to Your Baby Early’), which sits within the original Real Birth Digital Programme. The preterm birth modules created, filled a void in childbirth education which wasn’t previously available to people as part of their normal or routine antenatal classes and birth preparation conversations.

We recognised that some people have a higher chance of preterm birth, including those from marginalised communities and global majority ethnic groups, and that our digital platform can help support them to have better clinical outcomes, and overall, more positive birth experiences. The Real Birth Company created the modules in collaboration with service users and expert clinicians within this field, to develop a tool of value for both birthing people and clinicians alike. 

And then to round off an already productive year, we were immensely proud to have won the Innovate Award from the AHSN (Academic Health and Science Network) and NHS Confederation, for the category of ‘Innovation helping to address health inequalities’ – What an accomplishment! This added the icing on the cake for 2023, and was a recognition of all the collaborative hard work and effort which has gone into the business so far to create the Digital Programme.

2024 – Looking ahead

The Real Birth Company is thrilled to announce that following on from our initial project, we have been selected for Phase 2 funding from SBRI. We have been awarded an extraordinary £500,000 to further develop the platform, and accelerate our innovation using digital technology to narrow the health equity gap in maternity care. 

This opportunity is exciting as the competition was so high. Of the 20 organisations selected for Phase 1 funding last year, a maximum of 5 were selected for Phase 2. 

In 2024 The Real Birth Company will embark on a 12-month long project to utilise the new funding to further develop our Digital Programme. This will be done by creating the UK’s first childbirth information programme tailored for marginalised communities, with the aim to increase equity, improve perinatal health and reduce rates of costly intervention and caesarean birth. As part of this project we will be working in collaboration with In Sign Language to have all 11 modules of our digital programme translated into British Sign Language (BSL) to help support and improve access to childbirth education for the Deaf community. We will also be working directly alongside Epsom & St Helier University Hospital NHS Trust, which has one of the highest diversity rates in the country, evaluation partners Unity In sights and HECO Analytics will be supporting us to provide health economic statistics on the impact we are making nationally.

We know that health inequalities exist within healthcare generally, but failings specifically within the maternity care system have been highlighted in recent years. All confidential enquiry reports since 2000 have shown a greater risk for mothers from global majority groups, compared to white mothers. Black African women as a group have consistently remained at the highest risk, with Asian and mixed ethnicity women also at elevated risk. Women living in the most deprived areas continue to have the highest maternal mortality rates, and black and brown babies are dying at twice the rate of white babies. Black families also have the lowest rate of breastfeeding initiation amongst all ethnic groups and black mothers also experience a disproportionate number of barriers to breastfeeding. Given that breastfeeding is a proven strategy for protecting mothers and their infants from chronic and acute conditions and is known to build a strong foundation for lifelong health and wellness, we still have a long way to go to bridge the equality gap.

And so it begins…

2024 is already shaping up to be an eventful ride; with lots of new and exciting opportunities enabling us to reach as many people as possible through our personalised Digital Programme, particularly those who are marginalised and at higher risk of pregnancy and birth complications. Accompanying those opportunities will no doubt come with big challenges, but we’re ready to see what the year brings, and we will endeavour to embrace those challenges with both hands. 

So, watch this space! We will keep you updated as things progress.