Project #148:
The impact of COVID-19 on pregnancy treatment pathways and outcomes

In the UK there was a delay in the uptake of COVID-19 vaccinations for pregnant mothers due to safety concerns of the vaccine and impacts on the unborn child. It is now known that in the height of the pandemic 10% of pregnant women who caught COVID-19 were admitted to hospital for critical care during their pregnancy and 18% of mums with COVID-19 during their pregnancy delivered early (2.5 times that of the background rate).

A lot of non urgent healthcare services were reduced during the pandemic. Little is known about the impact of the pandemic on the care of mothers that did not have COVID-19 infections and how the pandemic impacted their continuity of care.

To date, most studies have looked at summary statistics of secondary care provision (what happened in hospitals). The main objective for work is to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the treatment pathway for mothers during their pregnancy episode, the impact on pregnancy outcomes and postnatal follow-up. This will look at how mothers interacted with healthcare services and the consequences on maternal health postnatally.