Parallel Pathways
What if our past experiences could be used to shape our future care?
It’s a simple idea. It’s at the core of the patient tutoring work I participate in, supporting medical students to learn about the patient experience of pregnancy loss by sharing reflections on my own journey through complex recurrent miscarriage. I am proud to be part of this programme and constantly in awe of the grace and bravery of my fellow patient tutors as we use our past experiences to improve the future care of others.
I am also interested in whether this feedback loop can happen in real time and what it would take to enable more flexible and responsive reproductive care pathways.
I have been here before — and I don’t feel the way you think I should.
The Parallel Pathways Participant Survey will available here from July 2026.
Reproductive care is often understood as a series of separate encounters. The clinical world treats each encounter as discrete but for many people moving across different pathways, sometimes over the course of many years, these encounters are part of a much larger multifaceted picture. The same components recur — ultrasounds, consultations, waiting rooms, blood tests, surgery, pain relief, bleeding, contractions, recovery and reflection — they repeat and they echo, carrying memories of what came before and fears of what might come again.
Parallel Pathways is a research project exploring what it feels like to move through reproductive care when the mind and body remember more than the healthcare system acknowledges. When repeated components become deeply and uncomfortably familiar:
I have been here before — and I don’t feel the way you think I should.
This project aims to understand those experiences. How does familiarity impact our experiences of different procedures? How does it shape the care that we need? What makes clinical encounters supportive or difficult? How could we harness the power of familiarity to build trust and provide more responsive care?
Please support the project by sharing your views:
This is an invitation to anyone who has moved through fertility treatment, pregnancy loss, pregnancy, or related care to share their experiences through an anonymous online survey. You can answer as much or as little as you wish.
Your reflections will help to build a clearer picture of how reproductive care can better recognise and respond to the realities of repeated or parallel journeys and help us to answer the question:
What would reproductive care look like if familiarity were recognised, expected, and used to support more flexible, patient-led pathways?
If you would like to take part, you can read the Participant Information Page here.
The Participant Survey will available here from July 2026.
You can sign up to receive updates on this project and related projects in women’s health using the form below.
The sign up is separate to protect the anonymity of the survey responses, you can also use it to submit queries or feedback.