It is essential that health care services are responsive to consumer needs, wishes, and expectations. Treating consumers as partners in health care service planning, design, delivery, and evaluation is a requirement of health care standards in some countries. In Australia, the National Safety and Quality Health Service standard, Partnering with Consumers, identifies "patients as partners in their own care, to the extent that they choose."1^(para.2) For this partnership to be realized, consumers of health care must be able to speak about their experience within the health care context. For example, the design of and improvements to maternity service systems must have women's perspectives embedded in the process. It is only when the voices of women from all areas of the community are reflected in service provision that health care quality and equity are possible.

Qualitative research that captures the lived experience of women provides important evidence on which to base planned change to health care service delivery. One mixed methods systematic review2 examined women's experiences and psychosocial outcomes of reduced hospital length of stay after a cesarean delivery and noted that more qualitative research was required. Qualitative systematic reviews that integrate research evidence on women's experiences are a valuable resource for practitioners, leaders, and managers of maternity services. There is a need for more qualitative systematic reviews that focus on women's experiences across the range of maternity service points of care. This issue of JBI Evidence Synthesis includes systematic review protocols on pregnancy and smoking3 as well as on postnatal care interactions with health care providers.4 Our systematic review of women's experiences of early hospital discharge5 following vaginal birth is also included in this issue. Qualitative systematic reviews are important as they highlight women's perspectives and provide a body of evidence on which to base healthcare improvement.

Our systematic review synthesized qualitative studies relating to women's experiences of early postnatal discharge.5 We conclude that during pregnancy and the postnatal period, women require skilled care; however, due to individual physical and psychosocial differences, that level of care needs to be tailored to each woman, which has implications for early postnatal discharge practices. Different tailored pathways of care are recommended that recognize the differing needs of individual women.

One of the challenges in synthesizing studies in our systematic review was the many models of care that have emerged across maternity services nationally and internationally. The different approaches to care provision can complicate attempts to identify and compare the success of programs because of the differences in staffing, professional collaborative arrangements, and approaches to antenatal and postnatal care provision. A particular challenge in exploring early discharge for women postnatally was the lack of an agreed definition of "early discharge from hospital."5

The outcomes of qualitative systematic reviews can assist policy makers, administrators of maternity services, midwives, and other practitioners who work with women who access maternity services to develop models of maternity care that accommodate women's experiences and reflect their preferences. To meet both national health service standards and professional practice standards, women must be placed at the center of their care. It is only when this happens that a health care system becomes truly consumer-focused.

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