George, Kendall, Rowe, Jennifer, Barnes, Margaret, and Kearney, Laurne (2021) The Parenting Premmies Support Program: Designing and developing a mobile healthintervention for mothers of preterm infants. Cogent Social Sciences, 7 (1). 1865617.

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Abstract

This article describes the development of the Parenting Premmies Support Program, a mobile health intervention designed to support mothers during the transitional time following their preterm infant’s discharge from hospital. Examples of how research teams give voice to the target population throughout the development and design of mHealth programs is largely missing from the literature. A detailed description of the steps taken in the development of the mHealth intervention that formed the support program is the intention of this paper. An exploratory, sequential, mixed-methods approach with a three-phase design was conducted. In each phase, the experience and perspectives of mothers of preterm infants were acknowledged and included. Phase one sought women’s accounts of their experience collected in semi-structured interviews (n = 9) and subject to a descriptive content analysis. In the second phase, a collaborative, stakeholder interrogation of issues was conducted to develop content of the mHealth protocol. In this phase, two interdependent procedures were used with two participant panels; a stakeholder panel (n = 10) undertook a series of face-to-face meetings, and a user group panel (n = 18) of women who had birthed a preterm infant up to 12 months before undertook an online Delphi survey. In phase three a pilot implementation of the program was undertaken with women whose preterm infants were being discharged home from hospital. The outcome was an mHealth protocol, a resource designed to support women by giving them information to understand and normalise their experience with their preterm infants, and to help them make decisions which may enhance responsive mothering. Collaborative research integrating user feedback in partnership with experts in the field increases the likelihood the final product will be of value and prove supportive and useful to the target audience.

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