Aim
- Contribute to the national ambition, set out in Better Births, to reduce the rates of maternal and neonatal deaths, stillbirths and brain injuries that occur during or soon after birth by 50% by 2025.
- Contribute to the national ambition, set out in Safer Maternity Care, to reduce the national rate of preterm births from 8% to 6%.
- Improve the safety and outcomes of maternal and neonatal care by reducing unwarranted variation and provide a high-quality healthcare experience for all women, babies, and families across maternity and neonatal care settings in England.
- Saving Babies Lives (SBLV3), safety action point-5.
Objectives
- To improve the optimisation and stabilisation of the preterm infant
- To improve the prevention, identification, escalation, and response (PIER) to maternal and neonatal deterioation.
- Objectives aligned to The 3 Year Maternity and Neonatal Plan.
Driver diagram 2024/25
Perinatal Culture and Leadership Programme (PCLP) Continued Support - 24/25
The National Maternity and Neonatal Programme have commissioned the PSCs to support QUAD (Quadrumvirate) teams to continue the work undertaken as part of PCLP.
The PCLP has been designed to support perinatal leadership teams to create and craft the conditions for a positive culture of safety and continuous improvement, have a positive impact on the experiences of women, families and babies and enable a more collaborative, supportive workplace. The PCLP has also aimed to enable psychologically safe working environments and develop compassionate leadership to make work a better place to be.
With the continued support from the National Maternity and Neonatal team the PSC will provide local level support for providers to continue building on improvement planning with a focus on developing relationships and collaboration across the perinatal team and realise their culture improvement plans.
Optimisation of the pre-term infant care bundle
Ensure the effective optimisation and stabilisation of the preterm infant by embedding a pathway of care consisting of nine evidence-based interventions leading to improved health outcomes.
All 9 key interventions to be implemented, as a pathway approach.
There is strong evidence that babies who receive all aspects of the care bundle have better outcomes, a key aim of MatNeo SIP is to reduce the variation in outcomes for mothers and babies across England. The British Association of Perinatal Medicine (BAPM) have released a perinatal quality improvement (QI) package to support trusts to implement the care bundle. You can find it here.
An information leaflet for parents about improving the outcome for pre-term babies can be found here.
We have been supporting local improvement teams to implement this care bundle since November 2020 and are seeing an improvement across the North West Coast.
Early recognition and management of deterioration in mothers and babies
Ensure the use of the Maternity Early Warning Score (MEWS) tool is supported within an effective PIER pathway for managing deterioration.
Ensure the use of the New-born Early Warning Trigger and Track (NEWTT2) tool is supported within an effective PIER pathway for managing deterioration.
Please follow the link for the NEWTT2 resources
The national patient safety team have launched 3 MEWS podcasts which describe how the tool has been developed, discusses the benefits of a standardised approach to reduce variation and discusses feedback from pilots of the tool and the importance of a standardised approach to implementation.
Podcast 1: https://soundcloud.com/nhsengland/maternity-early-warning-score-podcast-1
Podcast 2: https://soundcloud.com/nhsengland/maternity-early-warning-score-podcast-2
Podcast 3: https://soundcloud.com/nhsengland/national-maternity-early-warning-score-podcast-3
We are supporting teams to implement Each Baby Counts Learn and Support Toolkit to help develop effective pathways of escalation in preparation for implementation of the MEWS & NEWTT2 tools. Please contact us if you would like any support. Additional resources can be found within our Future NHS workspace.
Updates
- Sign up to our Future NHS workspace to access resources from our learning events and special interest groups (SIG) to support you with the implementation of the MatNeo SIP programme.
Previous programmes
Early supported discharge of preterm babies
We worked with the Applied Research Collaboration for the North West Coast (ARC NWC) on a project to identify the best models of care for the early supported discharge of preterm babies.
