Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Good quality health care should include opportunities for personal choice and be focused on individual needs. Decisions about health care made by clients, their support people, and by health professionals and policy makers can be supported by the use of research evidence. Where to give birth is one such decision. Research on different people's experiences and perspectives of home birth could usefully inform individual decisions about where to give birth, and policy decisions about the type of birthplace services that are supported. However, the research exploring different people's perspectives and experiences of home birth is fragmented, spans multiple countries and contexts, and has not been thoroughly examined. Health care service provision and use could be improved by bringing this research together to make its key findings available. To support the use of evidence about different people's perspectives on home birth when making personal and policy decisions, we propose using systematic review methods to conduct a scoping review of this research. This will be informed by, and contribute to, two planning meetings working with key experts in home birth, including members of the public. These stakeholders will consider the usefulness of this evidence for personal and policy decision making and how well it fits with Canadian (and possibly international) settings. Findings will then be presented at and explored in an upcoming international conference on global maternity care. This work will build relationships between researchers and knowledge users. It will form the basis of future collaborative funding applications that will focus on important priorities surrounding home birth issues among different groups of stakeholders. These will inform personal decision aids or evidence briefings. The results will also show were gaps exist in the current evidence focused on people's perspectives and experiences of home birth, suggesting where new research should focus.