Maternity Services

(asked on 4th September 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what plans the Government has to act upon the recommendations made by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists' report, Each Baby Counts, published in June 2017, to improve maternity care.


Answered by
Philip Dunne Portrait
Philip Dunne
This question was answered on 11th September 2017

The Government and NHS England are supporting National Health Service maternity services to implement important changes that address the key recommendations in the Each Baby Counts report.

We published Safer Maternity Care: next steps towards the national maternity ambition in October last year to achieve the National Maternity Ambition to halve the rates of stillbirths, neonatal and maternal deaths and brain injuries by 2030. This action plan, which feeds into the NHS England-led Maternity Transformation Programme, includes:

- an £8 million Maternity Safety Training Fund, which has been shared out to every NHS maternity unit to enable multidisciplinary teams to undertake training on CGT fetal monitoring, obstetric emergency skills and drills, leadership, human factors and team working;

- the Saving Babies Lives Care Bundle which supports maternity teams by bringing together four key elements of care based on best available evidence and practice in order to help reduce stillbirth rates – these are reducing smoking in pregnancy, risk assessment and surveillance for fetal growth restriction, raising awareness of reduced fetal movement and effective fetal monitoring during labour;

- the development of a National Standardised Perinatal Mortality Review Tool that will be available later this year to support maternity and neonatal units to undertake and share learning from standardised, high quality case reviews of every stillbirth and neonatal death; and

- consultation on a Rapid Resolution and Redress scheme, which would contribute to reducing severe avoidable birth injuries through improved investigations and learning.

In addition, NHS Improvement launched a new Maternal and Neonatal Health Safety Collaborative – a three-year programme to improve clinical practices and reduce variations in outcomes involving every trust, making it one of the largest maternity quality improvement programmes.

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