The COVID-19 pandemic has posed multiple significant challenges to healthcare systems. Preparations for the expected rise in COVID-19positive patients in March-April 2020 resulted in 6 out of 12 wards at University College Hospital in London being converted into COVID-19 wards. Many healthcare professionals, including paediatric nurses and neurosurgeons, were redeployed to ensure that wards were sufficiently staffed. The uncertainty of new roles, unfamiliar teams, personal risk and rapidly evolving guidelines led to significant anxiety about redeployment. To address this anxiety and prepare staff for working on the reconfigured wards, we designed a series of half-day clinical simulation sessions accessible to all healthcare professionals and evaluated their impact on participants' confidence.
Respectful maternity care (RMC) is part of a global movement addressing the previous absence of human rights in global safe maternal care guidance. RMC is grounded in kindness, compassion, dignity and respectful working conditions. The decolonisation movement in healthcare seeks to dismantle structural biases set up from a historically white, male, heteronormative Eurocentric medical system. This article applies a decolonising lens to the RMC agenda and examines barriers to its implementation in UK healthcare systems. Searches of peer-reviewed journals about decolonising maternity care in the UK revealed little. Drawing from wider information bases, we examine power imbalances constructed throughout a history of various colonial biases yet lingering in maternity care. The overarching findings of our analysis revealed 3 areas of focus: professional structures and institutional biases; power imbalances between types of staff and stakeholders of care; and person-centred care through a decolonial lens. To uproot inequity and create fairer and more respectful maternity care for women, birthing people and staff, it is vital that contemporary maternity institutions understand the decolonial perspective. This novel enquiry offers a scaffolding to undertake this process. Due to significant differences in colonial history between Western colonising powers, it is important to decolonise with respect to these different territories, histories and challenges.
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