Brighton student’s app seeks to improve midwifery care for people of colour

A student at the University of Brighton has created an innovative health app designed to improve maternal and neonatal care for black and brown people.

Ruby Jackson got the idea for the app while on an international placement trip to Ghana as part of her degree in midwifery.

Ruby’s app, Melanatal, is an educational tool designed to equip birthing people and clinicians with better knowledge of the signs and symptoms of a range of maternal and neonatal conditions on black and brown skin, including jaundice, pre-eclampsia and mastitis.

She hopes greater understanding and awareness of the differences in clinical presentation of these conditions will help reduce race-based health inequalities.

Black and brown women in the UK are nearly four times more likely to die in pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum compared with white women, and black babies have the highest rate of both stillbirth and neonatal death.

The app has shown great promise, with Ruby securing a place on the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme.

This in turn gave her the opportunity to pitch the idea as part of a global digital health challenge delivered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) Healthcare, Cogniss and The Validitron.

In June, she was named one of two winners of the competition, earning 12 months of mentorship and business support to bring the app to life.

Ruby, who’s due to graduate in the winter, will be running a pilot this year with the hope of fully operationalising the app and working with NHS trusts to adopt and integrate it into their services.

She said: “It was during my placement in Ghana that I first saw how jaundice presented on a baby with dark skin, and I realised I had never seen anything like that.

“As I reflected on this as my practice, I thought of Melanatal as a means of bridging the existing knowledge gap.

“This app will help provide much-needed information for black and brown women. Through Melanatal, clinicians can get better knowledge to care for black babies.”

Lucy Dentice, national programme manager on the NHS Clinical Entrepreneurs Programme, added: “Ruby’s journey with Melanatal is truly inspiring.

“Her innovative approach, shaped by her experiences in Ghana, highlights her unwavering commitment to addressing health inequalities for black and brown communities.

“It’s been a privilege to support her through the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme, and I’m excited to see the positive impact her app will have on maternal and neonatal care.”