Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that maternity and neonatal safety improvement schemes include a focus on mitigating the effects of inequalities.

In March 2023, NHS England published its three-year delivery plan for maternity and neonatal services. This sets out how the National Health Service will make maternity and neonatal care more equitable, as well as safer and more personalised.

The three-year delivery plan is based on evidence, including the impact on inequalities where available, and wide consultation. NHS England is tracking the impact on maternity and neonatal outcomes based on ethnicity and deprivation.

A central ambition of the delivery plan is to reduce inequalities in access, experience and outcomes for women and babies. This is being delivered through the implementation of Local Maternity and Neonatal Systems equity and equality action plans and advocating a proportionate universalism approach, alongside targeted service models designed to reduce inequalities, including enhanced midwifery continuity of carer and culturally sensitive genetics services for high need areas.

NHS England is also providing training and resources for all maternity and neonatal staff, so they can deliver culturally competent and sensitive care. This includes access to cultural competence training, developed in partnership with the Royal College of Midwives, and provision of clinical training aids to support care for women and babies with black or dark skin. In November 2023, NHS England offered £50,000 funding to each NHS England regional team in England to implement ethnic minority workforce training to upskill staff and promote more equitable experience for service users.

In January 2024, the NHS Race and Health Observatory launched the Learning and Action Network in partnership with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and the Health Foundation. The Learning and Action Network will utilise an anti-racism approach to quality improvement to drive clinical transformation and enable system-wide change. It will work with nine healthcare systems to improve maternal and neonatal health outcomes.

Additionally, the Care Quality Commission’s (CQC’s) national maternity inspection programme, which completed in December 2023, looked at how services are addressing inequalities in maternity care through a safety and leadership lens. The CQC will be reporting on their findings from the inspection programme later this year and will include findings relating to inequalities.