Maternity Services: Staff
(asked on 17th October 2017) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that maternity units deliver full cover and staff at weekends.
Configuration of services is a matter for the local National Health Service, but it is important for providers to ensure that the maternity workforce has the right skills to provide high quality maternity care at all times. Local trusts need to look carefully at the mix of their patient load, risk profile and staffing to decide the appropriate consultant presence for their particular unit. We have committed to ensure that by 2020, seven days a week there is sufficient consultant cover to assess and review patients who are admitted in an emergency (including specifically in obstetrics and pediatrics), access to all urgent diagnostic tests and consultant cover for key interventions.
At the request of the Department and NHS England, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published guidelines in February 2015 on safe midwifery staffing in units led by midwives (both alongside hospitals and free-standing), and all other maternity settings, including at home, in the community, in day assessment units, and in obstetric units. It aims to improve maternity care by giving advice on monitoring staffing levels and actions to take if there are not enough midwives to meet the needs of women and babies in the service.
The full NICE guidance is available at:
https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng4
The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) produced guidance on implementing the NICE staffing guideline on midwifery staffing in maternity settings in November 2016. The purpose of this guidance is to assist Directors of Midwifery, Heads of Midwifery, and other senior midwives, as well as general and division managers, in implementing the safe staffing guidelines for midwives in maternity settings.
The full RCM guidance is available at: