The Fundación para el Fomento de la Investigación Sanitaria y Biomédica de la Comunitat Valenciana (Fisabio) is a non-profit scientific and healthcare entity.
We worked on the MENINA (MENtal Health and wellbeing Improvement during pregNAncy) research project, which is part of the European initiative 'IMPETUS for citizen science' and is funded by the Horizon Europe program with the aim of improving the mental health and wellbeing of pregnant women.
Project challenge
Therefore, the MENINA project in which Ikigai collaborates aims to promote psychosocial well-being and the prevention of mental disorders in mothers during pregnancy.
How to uncover mental health problems experienced by pregnant women during gestation, while evaluating current care and detection protocols?
How we did it
Research design
We defined a sample of pregnant women between 12 and 24 weeks of gestation, without previous pathologies or risk pregnancies, and on the other hand, a representation of health personnel from mental health, gynecology and obstetrics and midwives.
We conducted 12 interviews with women and a focus group with health personnel.
Field work
The empathic interviews with the pregnant women allowed us to understand the whole process of experiences to date and the expectations they had of the end of pregnancy and the beginning of the puerperium. In all the steps of the interviews, special emphasis was placed on understanding the emotional journey experienced during pregnancy, with a view to finding shortcomings or improvements to be made in mental health care.
Conversations with healthcare personnel allowed us to get another point of view on the current processes of care for pregnant women.
Research findings
Pregnant women highlighted several things that negatively affect their mental health, such as lack of recurrent information, lack of clarity and understanding in the information provided to them, and the need to create support networks to share experiences.
On the other hand, the healthcare professionals emphasized the need to improve consultation times, protocols related to mental health and communication with patients as well as interdepartmental communication.
Confronting both contexts allowed us to capture in a journey the key moments of a person's pregnancy.
This phase of the project ended in a collaborative pain point identification session in a face-to-face format. Using the Journey as-is as a base, we worked on identifying the main pain points of the process to bring to light key themes and moments to work on.
We then moved into the ideation phase. Using the Crazy 8's technique to provide as many solutions as possible to the pain points detected in order to diverge and align around the key moments to be worked on in the next phases of the project.
