Grant: Prize - IHDCYH Talks

The placenta is a temporary organ that develops during pregnancy. It mediates all communication between you and the fetus, but it is not merely a conduit for communication1. The placenta is essential for a healthy pregnancy: it nourishes the fetus, protects it from infection, and produces hormones that help adapt your body to pregnancy and support fetal growth1. In turn, developmental events in utero influence postnatal and infant health outcomes1,2. While research of the placenta is made possible by parents that choose to donate their placenta at delivery, the importance of the placenta and the knowledge that we gain from its research is rarely shared widely for a lay audience. “Meet your placenta” introduces this organ by addressing four basic questions: what it is, how it works, why it is important, and what happens to it after delivery. Props used in the video were hand sewn in felt. The video was recorded using iStopMotion software and post-processed in Adobe Premiere. Our video purposefully avoids jargon and can be used as an educational resource by healthcare professionals to help patients learn about the placenta, as we believe that knowledge is empowering and information about how our bodies work in pregnancy can be scarce. “Meet your placenta” is also the introduction to our larger knowledge translation project, “Know your placenta”3, which aims to raise awareness and increase literacy about the role of the placenta in pregnancy and why placental research is important.