As part of the work being carried out by our maternity teams to support the most vulnerable women in our communities, our Matron for Patient Experience, Alex Keaskin, has helped secure funding, along with support from the West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board, to introduce the JanamApp.

Janam means 'birth' or 'life' in several South Asian languages. The app is aimed at South Asian women and their families and is translated into six languages.

Here in the UK more than 75,000 babies are born to South Asian mums every year, and they are two and a half times more likely to experience poor maternal outcomes, so it’s an important topic for us at CHFT and the diverse population we serve.

The JanamApp supports shared decision making and means women can make informed choices about their maternity care, promoting better experience, reducing risk and promoting self-care.

The app is culturally sensitive and evidence based and available to our service users for free. It can be downloaded from Android or Apple stores. Patients just need to ask their midwife for an access code.

Alex said: “This is just a small part of the larger piece of work we are doing in maternity to reduce health disparity.

“We’ve trained lots of our midwives as well as a large number of people in partner organisations and across the patch who work with pregnant women from South Asian backgrounds.”

Midwife and Janam Champion, Lily Fielding, said: "It was really good to have information about pregnancy and pregnancy emergencies such as fetal movements translated, and being able to signpost women to information that was already translated which made it more accessible for service users.

"Women have said the app is really useful and that before the app, they had to save any questions for when they had community midwife appointments. The app now means that all the information they need is available to them at any time."