Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to further reduce the incidence of still births.

My Rt. hon. Friend the Secretary of State is committed to reducing the rates of stillbirth in England and improving maternity outcomes for women and babies. In November 2015, he announced a national ambition to halve the rates of stillbirths, neonatal and maternal deaths and brain injuries that occur during or soon after birth by 2030. The Safer Maternity Care: next steps towards the national maternity ambition, published in October 2016, then set out a suite of initiatives, including actions to tackle issues of culture, leadership, and learning, in order to improve safety in maternity units and the outcomes and experience of care for mothers and babies.

The action plan included the Saving Babies’ Lives Care Bundle which is designed to support midwives and other clinicians to identify risks and implement care to prevent stillbirths and neonatal deaths in a focused way. The four interventions included in the Care Bundle are:

- Reducing Smoking In Pregnancy;

- Detecting Fetal Growth Restriction;

- Raising Awareness Of Reduced Fetal Movement; and

- Improving Effective Fetal Monitoring During Labour.

The Care Bundle is being tested and piloted by volunteer maternity care providers. NHS England will then consider how to support implementation nationwide, as part of the Maternity Transformation Programme.

The Department has also funded the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford to develop a national standardised Perinatal Mortality Review Tool to support local perinatal death reviews. This is an important contribution to the efforts to reduce stillbirths as the tool will ensure systematic, multidisciplinary, high quality reviews are carried out on the circumstances and care leading up to and surrounding each stillbirth and neonatal death. It will then enable maternity and neonatal staff to identify emerging themes across a number of deaths to support learning and changes in the delivery and commissioning of care, to improve future care and prevent future deaths which are avoidable.