Reflective videos by early-stage researchers

Alba Crespo’s secondment at the University of South-Eastern Norway

As part of the public deliverable Production of reflective videos by early-stage researchers during secondments, IPOV – RESPECTFUL CARE presents this short reflective video featuring Alba Crespo, midwife, sexologist and couples therapist at Vall d’Hebron Hospital in Barcelona, affiliated with the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR).

The video documents Alba Crespo’s secondment at USN – the University of South-Eastern Norway, within the framework of the European project IPOV – RESPECTFUL CARE, funded by the European Union under the Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Staff Exchanges programme.

This audiovisual output forms part of the project’s commitment to documenting training, mobility and knowledge-exchange activities developed across the consortium. It contributes to Work Package 2 – Documents and Data, led by the University of Udine, and reflects the role of secondments as spaces for professional development, interdisciplinary learning and international collaboration.

A secondment focused on respectful maternity care

During her stay at the University of South-Eastern Norway, Alba Crespo focused on deepening her understanding of respectful maternity care and exploring how this approach is addressed through education, research and clinical practice in the Norwegian context.

Her secondment offered the opportunity to engage with different professional, academic and healthcare environments. As she explains in the video, she took part in simulation-based teaching activities, visited healthcare centres, hospitals, training spaces and primary care services, and exchanged experiences with professionals, researchers and midwifery students.

The experience also included collaboration on the analysis of interviews conducted with midwifery residents at Vall d’Hebron Hospital by colleagues from USN during their previous secondment. This continuity between mobility experiences illustrates one of the core objectives of MSCA Staff Exchanges: to strengthen knowledge transfer between partner institutions and to build sustained research collaboration across countries.

Learning across healthcare systems and research cultures

Alba Crespo’s testimony highlights how secondments can open spaces for comparison, reflection and learning between different healthcare systems. Her experience in Norway allowed her to reflect on the multiple factors that influence the care women receive during pregnancy, childbirth and the postnatal period.

The video underlines that respectful maternity care depends not only on clinical knowledge and technical skills, but also on broader institutional and relational dimensions. These include the organisation of services, institutional culture, relationships between professionals, communication, and the capacity to listen to and respect women’s decisions.

From her perspective, respectful care begins by placing women at the centre as active subjects of their rights and decisions related to their health. The role of healthcare professionals, she explains, is to accompany, inform and support women through a comprehensive, integrative and holistic approach, grounded in the best available scientific evidence.

This reflection is directly aligned with the broader objectives of IPOV – RESPECTFUL CARE: to contribute to the recognition, analysis and prevention of obstetric violence, and to promote respectful maternity care through research, training, knowledge exchange and dialogue between institutions, disciplines and social contexts.

Professional development and transferable skills

The video also illustrates the value of secondments as experiences of professional growth. Alba Crespo reflects on the personal and professional challenges involved in leaving a familiar environment, working in another language and engaging with new ways of teaching and researching.

Her stay at USN allowed her to strengthen her experience in qualitative research, broaden her perspective on maternity care and recognise the value of the knowledge she brings as a clinical midwife. This is particularly relevant within the MSCA Staff Exchanges framework, where mobility is not only understood as geographical movement, but also as a process of acquiring new skills, perspectives and capacities.

Through this secondment, Alba Crespo developed and reinforced transferable skills such as intercultural communication, collaborative work, reflective practice, qualitative analysis, professional self-confidence and the ability to connect clinical experience with research-based knowledge.

Bringing knowledge back to practice and training

A central contribution of Alba Crespo’s testimony is the connection between international learning and local application. She explains her intention to bring the knowledge, tools and reflections gained during the secondment back to her work at Vall d’Hebron, to the training of future midwives, and to the development of proposals that promote respectful, reflective and woman-centred maternity care.

This return dimension is essential in IPOV – RESPECTFUL CARE. The project does not understand secondments as isolated experiences, but as mechanisms for transferring knowledge back into partner institutions, professional environments and future training activities.

In this sense, Alba Crespo’s video contributes to documenting how the project supports the circulation of knowledge between research, clinical practice and education. It also shows how international collaboration can strengthen institutional reflection and help generate new questions, tools and proposals for improving maternity care.

A testimony of collaboration, reflection and growth

Beyond its technical and professional dimensions, the video also presents the secondment as a meaningful personal experience. Alba Crespo describes how spending time away from her usual context allowed her to slow down, reconnect with herself and recover creativity, curiosity and the desire to continue learning and creating.

This personal dimension is relevant to the purpose of the reflective video series. The deliverable does not only document activities carried out during secondments; it also creates a space for early-stage researchers to reflect on how international mobility shapes their professional identities, research perspectives and understanding of respectful maternity care.

Alba Crespo’s testimony therefore contributes to the wider narrative of IPOV – RESPECTFUL CARE: building knowledge through collaboration, recognising the value of diverse professional experiences, and creating bridges between countries, disciplines, institutions and practices.

About the video

Researcher: Alba Crespo
Sending institution: Vall d’Hebron Hospital / Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR), Barcelona, Spain
Host institution: University of South-Eastern Norway (USN), Norway
Project: IPOV – RESPECTFUL CARE
Programme: Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Staff Exchanges
Grant Agreement No.: 101130141
Work package: Work Package 2 – Documents and Data
Work package lead: University of Udine
Deliverable: Production of reflective videos by early-stage researchers during secondments
Format: Reflective video
Main topics: respectful maternity care, obstetric violence, midwifery education, qualitative research, professional training, international collaboration, woman-centred care

Licence

This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), unless otherwise stated.

This means that the video may be shared with appropriate attribution, but it may not be used for commercial purposes or modified, remixed, transformed or redistributed as a derivative work without prior authorisation.

PRODUCTION OF REFLECTIVE VIDEOS BY EARLY-STAGE RESEARCHERS DURING SECONDMENTS

EU funding acknowledgement and disclaimer

Funded by the European Union under the Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Staff Exchanges programme, Grant Agreement No. 101130141.

Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.