Company: Laerdal Medical

Client: In-house project

Country: Norway

The service is a subscription-based midwifery learning solution offering a low-dose, high frequency competency training, supported by a digital tool, complemented with optional maternity training kit, complete with manikins and essential equipment.

Challenge:

Every year, more than 300,000 maternal and 2.5 million newborn deaths occur worldwide (WHO). By fully investing in midwifery-led programs, 4.3 million lives could be saved per year by 2035 (UNFPA, WHO, ICM). However, we face a shortage of a million midwives worldwide. This project identified gaps in global midwifery education landscape and our existing portfolio to co-design a new solution helping achieve coverage in new markets.

Approach:

Guided by the organization’s development process, which is based on the double diamond model, we collaborated and co-created across teams including sales, marketing, services, product, technology, and business units adopting a user-centred and empathic approach. Our multi-disciplinary team actively participated in conducting user research and prototyping.

Outcomes:

A well-defined, innovative, end-to-end learning solution for midwifery education was illustrated by a future-state blueprint including existing physical products, redesigned digital tool, and new learning content relevant for midwifery curriculum. The service also includes an improved onboarding service (sales and service experiences), illustrated through journey maps, scenarios, and supporting implementation guides.

Impact:

The project and solution impacts are manifold:

1. Impact on the Organization:
   The team spanning 13 disciplines, thus far, set new benchmarks in internal processes being one of the fastest end-to-end project timelines in the organization’s history. This was made possible by co-creating with front-end service providers from the early stages of the project.
   
   
2. Impact on our customers:
   Although the impact of this service is yet to be assessed, we know it's meeting a need and trending in the right direction. Stakeholder engagement throughout all the stages of development, helped in building a co owned solution embraced by the customers and users. We hosted a launch event in June 2023 at an International Midwifery Conference where over 200 stakeholders registered to join, and 5 institutuons formally expressed interest to become beta test sites.
   
   
3. Impact on the Field:
   With a planned reach of 400,000 midwifery students through our solution by 2025, the project directly contributes to our organization’s mission of helping save lives and to UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 3.1 to reduce global maternal mortality rates, and SDG 3.2 to end preventable deaths of new-borns.