Wednesday, October 7, 2026
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Maternity care is under increasing pressure. Demand peaks unpredictably, staff are scarce and organizations do not always have insight into each other’s capacity. In the Maternity Care project, partners from the Delft-Rotterdam region are therefore working together on digitally supported solutions that transcend care pathways and organizations: a peak-load plan, capacity dashboards and a single patient record.
In an interview series on the Campus Rotterdam programpage, various stakeholders talk about what is needed to achieve this and why collaboration is so important, including Medical Delta chair Prof. Dr. Sanne de Vries. This interview was previously published on TUdelft.nl/campus-rotterdam
How is Medical Delta involved in this project?
"The Edison program contributes to the birth care project. Edison is one of the research programs within the Medical Delta programming , which runs from 2024 to 2028. Edison brings a design-oriented approach, with a view to scaling up birth care across the Netherlands. Medical Delta's programming emphasizes "transdisciplinary collaboration". By this we mean that not only different scientific disciplines, but also practitioners, such as healthcare professionals or patients, are involved directly from the start in research, innovation, and the implementation of innovative solutions in health practice.
Transdisciplinary consortia could submit a proposal to Medical Delta for a research program or living lab. The most promising and impactful proposals received "seeding money", a kind of start-up funding. We support these programs and living labs for four years in a variety of ways, so that they can expand their consortium, their research, and their activities. Doing this under a shared banner helps: it demonstrates good collaboration and ensures that everyone commits to a common goal."
What makes the birth care project so special, in your view?
"For me, this is a wonderful example of how transdisciplinary collaboration can lead to lasting innovation in healthcare. Innovations like this require the involvement of all relevant parties and a considerable investment of time at the start, but time and again it proves how important that is for what follows.
We regularly see promising innovations struggle to find their way into daily care practice. If something is simply "added on" and doesn't replace anything or offer direct added value, there is a good chance that the people who ultimately have to work with it will leave it aside. That is precisely why it is important to collaborate with everyone involved from the very beginning.
What is so good about the birth care project is that it took the time to work with all stakeholders to arrive at a very focused research question. On this basis, you can design and innovate in a targeted way, and you have the commitment of everyone involved, which greatly helps with making the innovation applicable, its eventual implementation, and its use."
How important is the human aspect in innovation and implementation?
"Social and technological innovations are needed to keep our healthcare system accessible, workforce-sustainable, and affordable. At the same time, innovation is nothing more than a means of making human action easier or better. The starting point should always be not the technology itself, but the value it adds for patients, professionals, and society. This is certainly not easy, because you do not know in advance what is possible. Co-creation with everyone involved is one solution to this.
Improving the streamlining of birth care is a typical example of a complex health challenge, in which you have to deal with an enormous number of factors
Improving the streamlining of birth care is a typical example of a complex health challenge, in which you have to deal with an enormous number of factors: care pathways, work processes, financial flows, and systems that all intersect and overlap. This is where you see the added value of industrial designers such as Julian and Brechtje. Together with those involved, they unravel the complex care pathways and innovation routes, and bring these together into shared goals, clear research questions, and ultimately concrete projects in which everyone can take on their own role. As a result, you arrive more quickly at innovative solutions that fit within existing care and work processes."
You describe this project as a great example of transdisciplinary collaboration. What is the broader impact, in your view?
"Scaling up is an important goal for all of our programs, living labs, and projects. The approach, principles, and findings of the birth care project are probably also applicable in other regions, and perhaps to other healthcare challenges as well.
At the same time, tailoring will again be needed: what works in one region cannot simply be copied in another.
And that is as it should be, because if you want real support and ownership from everyone involved, it is important to bring them along intensively throughout the entire process. In the case of the birth care project, this means you do not have to reinvent the wheel, but you can make important adjustments that increase the chances of success in that specific region or situation. In other words, you go through a "light" version of the process.’
Cross-fertilization with other Medical Delta research programs and living labs is also conceivable. One of our living labs focuses on both "prehabilitation" and rehabilitation: how do you enter a treatment as healthy as possible, and how do you come out of it as well as possible? This could also be a useful line of thinking for birth care: how do you enter childbirth as fit as possible, and ensure that maternity care then connects seamlessly with this? This is particularly interesting to investigate in complicated births involving surgery.
Within the convergence program "Healthy Start", TU Delft, Erasmus MC, and Erasmus University Rotterdam are also working on birth care, and there is collaboration here as well.
As a result, the impact of the birth care project is not limited to this region or this case alone. I hope it opens the door to further scaling up and a wider use of this way of working."
Photo: Guido Benschop
Text: Sietse Pots
