Our priorities (Part 3)

Strategic priority 3: Maternity and neonatal care

What success will look like: We will draw on our unique expertise and work with our system partners to support maternity and neonatal safety improvements.

We will complete independent evaluations of our Early Notification (EN) and Maternity Incentive Schemes (MIS) and use this learning to evolve each scheme.

We will achieve this by:

Our Early Notification Scheme will continue to proactively investigate specific brain injuries at birth

and will also share learning rapidly to support safety improvements and improve the process for obtaining compensation for families. Future development will include continuous improvement of the family liaison service and further collaboration with partners like MNSI to support a coordinated approach.

We will continue to work with and develop our Early Notification Maternity Voices Advisory Group

to provide external stakeholders, in particular families and their representatives, with a forum where they can advise and support future developments of the EN Scheme.

Our Maternity Incentive Scheme will continue to act as a convener for those involved in maternity and neonatal safety improvement

to incentivise an agreed set of safety actions. Emerging feedback from the evaluation shows that the MIS is perceived to be an important lever to raise the profile of maternity and neonatal services at Board level in trusts across England. We will work collaboratively with those who oversee, commission, provide and advise on maternity and neonatal services to ensure that the MIS safety actions are appropriately targeted, with cross-system support and reflect the government’s priorities and ambition on maternity and neonatal safety.

Supporting the wider maternity and neonatal system

through continuing our work to foster a just and learning culture, supporting cross-system action to address maternal and neonatal health inequalities and evolving our processes to identify, share and escalate insights and concerns