EASI Maternity Care Project

The EASI acronym stands for “effective and seamlessly integrated” and everyone involved in the EASI
Maternity Care Project wants to make maternity care EASI – for patients and clinicians. We are a
Vancouver-focused, multi-phase project focused on responding to gaps in patient preparedness along
the various stages of their maternity care journey. In our current work, maternity providers from family
physicians, obstetricians and midwives, along with all the key allied health involved in maternity care as
well as patients are working to create a Vancouver-based online maternity information hub for patients,
bringing together a curated list of all the best patient resources you can rely on.
The initiative is funded by the Shared Care Committee, a joint collaborative committee of Doctors of BC
and the Ministry of Health.

A key value of our project is to ensure as many voices as possible are involved. We’ve taken a page from
the “Pop-Up” shops phenomenon to create an opportunity for many people to help select the final
patient resources onto our online hub. These pop-up stores magically appear in a neighbourhood giving
you easier and temporary access to buy unique and different things and they disappear as quickly as
they arrived!
We are planning to do the same. We’ve grouped all the remaining maternity resources into 16 different
maternity topics/themes. Over the next few months, we’ll release topics a few at a time here on our
project webpage. If you are passionate about a topic, we’d love for you to click on it, review the short-
list of resources that we have compiled and select the handful that you feel are the best of the lot.

The infographic on this webpage shows our process in more detail. In short, 884 maternity resources
that were suggested to us to consider for our online hub. Of those, 597 of them have made it this far! To
get here, each resource has gone through a rigorous process of being reviewed by three different groups
– first our project operations team, then our Broader Consultation Group (patients,
counsellor/doula,public health nurse, etc.) gave their stamp of approval from their diverse perspectives,
and finally our Clinical Consultation Group (made up of family physicians, obstetricians, and midwives)
confirmed they were all clinically relevant.

When a maternity topic gets listed on our project webpage that interests you, all you need to do is click
the link. From there you will be directed to complete a short survey. The first page asks for a bit of
information about who you are. The second page lists all the remaining resources (around 20-30
resources depending on the topic), bundled into groups. We ask you to select 1 to 2 resources from each
group that you feel should get into the final online hub. The third page of the survey asks a handful of
evaluation questions about your experience.

We have too many resources that have been approved through the process of resource curation. Your
role is to help us make the final decisions of what gets onto the online maternity resource hub that
we’re creating for Vancouver. We invite you to bring your own experience and/or expertise of the
maternity journey in reviewing the list of resources we have for each topic and determine (through an
online form) the favourite/best 5-8 resources based on content/readability/feelings etc.

We have piloted our selecting in process and online form to determine the time commitment. To review
the list of resources and to submit your preferences in the online form takes approximately 30 minutes.

• Just a handful of reasons why we think you’ll want to be involved:
  You want to make the maternity care journey easier and more supported for patients in
  Vancouver;
• You will use and find value in the online information hub (as a maternity provider, as someone
  considering or in a maternity journey, or you have a loved one that would value this resource)
  and want a sneak peek at what will be in it;
• You want a chance to influence what makes it onto the final hub; and
• This is important work and my time will be compensated for. (Note: We ask for your name and
  contact information at the start of each online form so that we can follow-up with a token to
  reflect the value of your contribution and time.

Yes – we will keep each topic up on our project webpage for as long as we still need voices. So if more
than one topic is of interest to you, we welcome you to participate in multiple pop-ups.

On this project page, we have listed a number of topics currently open for pop-up participation. Click on
any of the topics to get started. We will be rotating through topics throughout the next few months, so
start now to avoid your topic(s) of interest disappearing before you can participate!