We invite you to participate in a project about your caesarean section wound healing, which is being conducted by Associate Professor Michelle Giles and her research team at Hunter New England Local Health District.
This project will help us to find out how many women experience infection after giving birth by caesarean section.
You are invited to this project because you have given birth by caesarean section at the John Hunter Hospital.
If you agree to participate, you click on the link provided in an SMS or an email message sent to you from our health service 30 days after your surgery. The link will take you to an online wound healing questionnaire via a service called "HealthTracker", and you are asked a series of questions related to your caesarean section wound. If you have indicated that you have seen a GP/Healthcare provider regarding your wound in the questionnaire, you will be asked to consent for us to contact your GP/Healthcare provider to confirm infection.
At the end of this questionnaire, we also ask for your feedback on your experience of completing the questionnaire. You may also be contacted by phone and asked to give your feedback on completing the questionnaire. The feedback will help to further improve HealthTracker in the future.
Participation in this research is entirely your choice. Whether or not you decide to participate, your decision will not impact the care you receive. You have the option of opting out by clicking ‘Unsubscribe’. However, if you do complete the questionnaire, you will not be able to delete your response. Completing the questionnaire and the feedback survey is your choice.
The wound healing questionnaire will take about 5 minutes to complete. If you want to complete the feedback survey, it will take another 1-2 minutes.
There are no anticipated risks associated with your participation in this project. There are no expected benefits to you personally from your participation, but the findings will help us to improve how we care for women with caesarean sections in the future. By doing the questionnaire and providing feedback, you will have the chance to share your views and help improve maternity services.
If participating in the project causes you personal distress or discomfort, please contact the research team listed below about the appropriate support service.
All information you give will be strictly confidential and de-identified. Identifying information will be removed, and code numbers will be used in place of names during the research process. Information will be kept in a secure password-protected computer system that only the researchers can access. No identifying information will appear in the study documents or used in publications from this research. We will keep all data for seven years, and then the data will be destroyed.
We will use the findings of the project to identify rates of caesarean section wound infections from the John Hunter Hospital. The feedback you give will improve the way we monitor caesarean section wound infections. The findings of the research will be used to improve health care provision to women and will be fed back to clinicians. We will not name or identify individual participants in any reports from the project.
If you require assistance from the interpreter service, please call Hunter Health Care Interpreting service on (02) 4924 6285.
If you require assistance from an Aboriginal health worker or midwife to support you in completing this survey, please contact Birra Li Aboriginal Maternal and Child Health Service on (02) 4016 4900
For further information about the project or assistance, please contact Michelle Giles on (02) 4924 6702. Thank you for thinking about participating in this project.
Michelle Giles
Principal Investigator, Nursing and Midwifery Research Centre
Tel: (02) 4924 6702
michelle.giles@health.nsw.gov.au
This research project has been approved by the Hunter New England Human Research Ethics Committee of Hunter New England Local Health District, Reference 2020/ETH02218.
Should you have any concerns regarding your rights as a participant in this research, or you have a complaint about the manner in which the research is conducted, it may be given to the researcher or, if an independent person is preferred, to:
Dr Nicole Gerrand
Manager, Research Ethics, HNE Research Office
Hunter New England Local Health District
HMRI Building Level 3
POD HMRI Lot 1 Kookaburra Circuit
New Lambton NSW 2305
Tel: (02) 4921 4950
nicole.gerrand@health.nsw.gov.au
HealthTracker is powered by the Vaxtracker surveillance engine, which is a project of Hunter New England Local Health District.
The Vaxtracker project is led by Patrick Cashman at Hunter New England Local Health District (HNELHD), and the Vaxtracker system is developed and maintained by Flexis Systems.