2.2.2. Stakeholder Interviews
We conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with national and regional level stakeholders (professionals, service user organisation representatives, policy makers) in the interviewees’ native language (English or Dutch). We used an interview guide with a focus on personalisation and safety in maternal and neonatal care during the pandemic (Supplementary File 2).
Thirty-nine national and regional maternity care stakeholders were purposively selected and invited to ensure that there was representation from all key maternity and service-user organisations involved in national maternity and neonatal policy during the pandemic in the UK and NL. Twenty-six participants from the UK and thirteen from the NL were interviewed (Table 2). More stakeholders were interviewed in the UK than in the NL, since the UK has more service-user organisations than the NL and we wanted to make sure we had representation of all devolved nations (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland). The interviews were held from July 2020 to December 2020 and were video- or audio-recorded in Microsoft Teams and transcribed using Sonix (Sonix Inc., San Francisco, CA) and MaxQDA software (v18.2.5) and were subject to post-transcription manual checks and editing. Interviews were undertaken by four researchers in the UK and two researchers in NL. All interviewers were experienced qualitative researchers and most of them had experience of undertaking research in maternity and/or neonatal care.

Table 2 Interview participants