2.1 Study design
This study was undertaken as part of the Achieving Safe and Personalised maternity care In Response to Epidemics (ASPIRE-COVID19) project designed to determine ‘what works’ in providing care for mothers, babies, and families during and after a pandemic [10].
One of the work packages of the ASPIRE study comprised a comparison between the UK and the NL maternity care responses, including documentary analysis of public maternity care organisational documents that influenced national maternity care policy and interviews with national maternity care stakeholders. Three domains are reported in this paper, because they emerged during the study as areas where there were evident differences between the two countries. These domains were choice of birthplace, companionship during the perinatal period, and the extent to which women and families in vulnerable situations had been considered. A modified “Framework Method”, with a combined inductive and deductive approach was used to examine similarities and differences in policy in these areas, and, more importantly, to identify drivers that might explain these similarities and differences [11].