Transforming Maternity Services: Better Births for the Future
This review concluded in February 2016 with the report, Better Births. The report set out a clear vision: for maternity services across England to become safer, more personalised, kinder, professional and more family friendly, where every woman has access to information to enable her to make informed choices about her care, and where she and her baby can access support that is centred on their individual needs and circumstances.
It also set out plans to support staff to deliver women-centred care, through high performing teams, in well-led, learning and supportive organisations.
To implement this vision, NHS England set up the Maternity Transformation Programme – a five year programme of work and development bringing together a wide range of organisations and partners to lead and deliver across 3 groups of workstreams: Local drivers for change, looking at supporting local transformation and increasing choice and personalisation; service improvement, looking at promoting safer care, perinatal mental health services, and improving prevention; and ‘system enablers’, looking at transforming the workforce, sharing data and information, digital technology and reforming the payment system. Each workstrea includes a range of organisations and partners such as the Royal College of Midwives, Public Health England, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, NICE and third-sector partners. The programme is set to run for 5 years, and multiple projects are underway within each work stream. Many improvements are already in place and starting to take effect, including:
- A range of measures to help reduce stillbirth and early neonatal death called the ‘saving babies’ lives care bundle’, bringing together focused interventions around reducing smoking in pregnancy (smoking raises the risk of stillbirth and early neonatal death), risk assessment and surveillance for foetal growth restriction, raising awareness of reduced foetal movement and effective foetal heartrate monitoring in labour
- Two new maternity decision aids (one for women having their first baby, and one for women who have had a baby before) helping women consider and decide where to have their baby
- An Amazon Alexa ‘skill’ to support women with information and advice about breastfeeding
The programme is overseen by a Programme Board of member organisations, and a stakeholder council whose job it is to scrutinise plans and outputs. Outputs from the programme are driven through the system in different ways, depending on their area of focus, but most will be implemented through the work of Local Maternity Systems (LMS) – an organisation of maternity services across the same ‘footprint’ as Integrated Care Systems (formerly known as STPs) – who are committed to implementing the ‘Better Births’ by the end of 2021. Each LMS includes a Maternity Voices Partnership – a committee of local parent representatives and providers of maternity services and related groups, who exist to ensure that women’s and families voices are heard in the City and the system.
The report can be found via the following link :
If you’d like to find out more about the maternity transformation plan and projects please click on the following link :
NHS England Maternity Transformation Plan
If you’d like to know more about Brighton and Hove’s MVP, you can find out at: brightonandhovemvp.com
Catherine Swann
Director
Healthwatch Brighton and Hove
July 2018
