About the programme

This work will discover what women think about anaemia and why women do (or do not) take iron tablets during pregnancy. This will help us to support women to take iron supplements regularly.

This will involve a small study amongst non-anaemic pregnant women to find the best dose of iron supplement with the fewest side effects, and to try a support-tool to check if it would help women to take the iron tablets.

We want to understand the real effects of giving low-dose iron supplements during pregnancy to prevent anaemia and its harmful complications, such as babies being born early.

To do this we will run a large study, in which 11,020 women will be allocated by chance (like tossing a coin) to receive either iron tablets or placebo (an inactive tablet that looks like an iron-tablet) during their pregnancy and up to 6 weeks after childbirth.

We will use the tool developed in the second workstream to support women to take the tablets, which will give us the best possible chance of testing whether oral iron supplements work to prevent anaemia.

We will be looking to see if there is any difference between the two groups of women; such as whether their babies are born early, or with a low birthweight.

This work will discover what women thought about taking iron and potential factors influencing this. This will help us to shape how a strategy for preventing anaemia in pregnancy is rolled out nationally.

The final piece of work will seek women's permission for data to be collected from national databases in a future project to assess the development of babies born to mothers participating in the trial.