The Synergist Annual Report

Introduction from the Programme Manager

Medicine use during pregnancy is lacking proper data and approximately 90% of pregnant women take medicine without knowing the consequences. IMI ConcePTION is an EU-funded collaborative project with over 88 diverse partners from civil society organisations to industry, academics, researchers and beyond, that aims to tackle the information gap in medicine use during pregnancy and breastfeeding across Europe.

Since the launch of the project in 2019, The Synergist has taken an important role across several activities, including an analysis of stakeholder needs and preferences, building a sustainability strategy, and contributing towards the creation of a European-wide “knowledge bank” or database containing information on medicine use during pregnancy and breastfeeding, to provide reliable and accurate up to date and evidence based safety information.

Taking the opportunity presented by our annual event Safe Motherhood Week, we ran a survey aimed at women in the general public to understand how they search for information on medicines during pregnancy and breastfeeding, with over 500 women across Europe and beyond sharing their preferences and feedback. This survey will be followed by a larger study in 2020 to understand the experiences and information needs of women and healthcare professionals.

Helena Harnik Programme Manager

About the project

Launched in April 2019, IMI ConcePTION is an EU-funded collaborative project with over 88 organisations from across Europe. It’s aim is to develop better information and tools for women who are pregnant or planning a pregnancy, women who want to breastfeed their children, as well as doctors, midwives, pharmacists and other healthcare providers. One element of this is informing women, healthcare professionals such as doctors and midwives, and other stakeholders about the use of medication during pregnancy and breastfeeding.

To tackle the difficulty in finding reliable and consistent information about how safe medicines are to use when a woman is pregnant or breastfeeding, we are developing a European-wide knowledge bank that will provide searchable and reliable advice. In addition, the project aims to build a model that will allow to predict the concentration of medicines in breastmilk and create the first Europe-wide breast milk biobank.

2019 Achievements

Over 500 women across Europe share their experiences and information needs

Women who are pregnant and breastfeeding, or who are planning to get pregnant, need information about their medicines. To be able to develop better information and tools for women in the future, we developed a survey to understand what kind of information women need, and how they prefer to receive that information.

During Safe Motherhood Week, we promoted the survey through our campaign, and with the support of our partners, including Women Deliver, we succeeded in bringing over 377 clicks to the survey which collected over 570 responses. The survey confirms the need for better tools and information for women on medicine use during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and provided important insights to inform the partners in the ConcePTION project. This survey will be followed by a larger study in 2020 targeting women, doctors, midwives and pharmacists.

Building an engaged audience to support ConcePTION

In order to achieve its objectives, ConcePTION needs to reach and engage with as many women and healthcare professionals as possible across Europe. To take advantage of synergies with the Motherhood Collective Impact Program and especially the Pregnancy & Medicine Initiative, we conducted interviews with Dr Ida Niklson and Dr Miriam Sturkenboom, joint leads of the project, which were published and promoted during Safe Motherhood Week. The Synergist was invited to lead overall communication efforts for this important project, beginning in 2020, and in this role we aim to bring our expertise in driving collaborative leadership to unite the 60+ partners behind a common strategy, build synergies between different activities, build an audience and a network of ambassadors who will help this project realise its full potential.

Our 2020 Approach

In 2020 we will continue to contribute across several important activities including stakeholder engagement, developing strategies to communicate with women and healthcare professionals, and designing a European-wide knowledge database containing information on medicine use during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Additionally, we will begin building a sustainability strategy to create an environment that will enable the project to succeed and continue to make an impact even after the conclusion of the five-year project.