Maternity Volunteering Service Project
In Aneurin Bevan University Health Board Maternity Services, alongside our service user group (BABI), we have been lucky enough to secure funding for a volunteer project from Safer Beginnings (incorporating The White Ribbon Alliance and Best Beginnings). This is essentially to reach more women in our diverse community, and encourage feedback and involvement at our BABI group from families who are currently underrepresented (where English is not the first language in the household, families who are homeless, refugees, etc.).
We are also seeing health inequalities and disparity in care which are usually related to people who do not speak English, not knowing where to find the information and resources available, or able to access these in their first language.
We currently have 5 volunteers in post, representing the following languages:
- Russian
- Polish
- Italian
- Romanian
- Afghanistan
*The volunteers will not be giving clinical advice.
Benefits for the volunteers:
- Empowering, ​helping and supporting members of the community
- Gaining/ developing new skills
- Meeting new people
- Support of the maternity services team and ABUHB volunteer service
- Becoming an advocate and voice for women and girls where English is not their first language
How has your programme supported a reduction in violence and harm for people during maternity and early years?
Indirectly through befriending, giving support and sharing information and acting as an advocate, we hope that women and girls supported by our volunteers feel more informed, able to know how to raise concerns and able to recognise that they can accept or decline any care. This related to all levels of direct and indirect violence and includes obstetric violence, FGM, family violence, racism and much more.
We provided our volunteers with anti-racism training (from a national anti-racism educator group) including recognising white privilege, recognising racist incidents, how to escalate and report all the above, and how to respond safely to an abuser. We also discussed safeguarding and how to get help quickly. We taught the volunteers about perinatal mental health and how to support and signpost people.
It is a little early in the project to measure the impact, but we have developed a programme of evaluation including qualitative research to explore the impact of the project.
In what ways have you ensured that women and girls from minoritised ethnic communities have been involved in the design, delivery and impact of your proposed activity?
All our volunteers have had a baby within the last year and all speak English as an additional language. We were intentionally not prescriptive with how the volunteer role would look as it was important that it reflected the needs of individual communities and groups.
Therefore, volunteers discussed how they felt the role should look based on the people they are supporting, and they all spoke to women in their networks who do not speak English (or Welsh) and asked what would be most helpful. They then created a role profile including befriending, support, directing to further resources, developing groups (coffee mornings and walking groups) and created posters to reflect this.
