Highlights from the project’s annual meeting
The fifth Impact Diabetes Bump2Baby (IDB2B) annual General Assembly meeting took place between the 13th and 15th of March 2024 in Dublin, Ireland. Hosted by the project’s coordinator University College Dublin, the meeting brought the consortium together to review progress and make plans for the final year of the project.
Preliminary analyses
It was very exciting to see the preliminary analyses of the trial data being presented by Professor Sharleen O’Reilly on our first day. It is too soon to share any information on this as the results are still being interrogated but they will soon form the basis of our primary outcomes paper for publication later this year. We also heard from Professor Timothy Skinner on his initial analysis about the fidelity of the trial, in other words did we do what we said we would do, and from Assistant Professor Laura Pirhonen Nørmark about the planned economic analysis of the intervention.
Lessons learned
We spent time discussing the lessons learned from running the trial, what worked well and what we might have done differently in hindsight. These insights will form part of a key output of the project, the Implementation Toolkit. This was discussed in detail along with the Implementation Workshops we will deliver towards the end of the year. These discussions enabled us to understand the variety of materials we need to develop in the coming months.
Mini projects
In the IDB2B project, we have a number of mini research projects being delivered by our team members, some of which are PhD theses and others relate to the trial. It was a pleasure to hear them present the initial findings and to start to see their efforts come to fruition. Topics covered included breastfeeding self-efficacy and the health of women breastfeeding in our sub-study, as well as unmet parental needs in Ireland. On the coaching side, we heard about synchronous and asynchronous communications and engagement of participants.
On the final day of the meeting, our Steering Committee discussed outstanding issues, remaining deliverables, planned publications and further collaboration plans.
External perspective
Throughout the three day annual meeting, we were privileged and grateful to be joined by External Advisory Board members Dr Fionnuala Gough, Professor Helen Murphy and Professor Molly Byrne, who provided additional perspective, guidance and ideas to the consortium. It was a busy few days but we left with an overarching feeling of much progress, anticipation for the results and excitement for the months remaining!
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The project team at UCD’s University Club