What mechanisms drive the successful delivery of high-quality maternity care within organisations? A realist review

Introduction:

Safe, high-quality maternity care is an essential component of healthcare provision to ensure the wellbeing of mothers, birthing people and their babies. However, there are known challenges and struggles to deliver great maternity care that leads to low rates of adverse outcomes, an optimal use of resources, and high rates of maternal and staff wellbeing consistently and equitably within England.

Objective:

Our review seeks to synthesise these issues framed within a different focus, drawing on ‘what works well’ through identifying and learning from successes in maternity care and through using a realist perspective that seeks to understand the context and mechanisms that produce (positive) outcomes to provide causal explanations of what works, why and how.