Ten out of ten for our maternity services
Our maternity services have been awarded top marks for safety in a national scheme to reward hospitals that improve facilities for mothers and babies.
We have now successfully met all 10 of the essential safety standards required of NHS trusts to improve the quality of care for women, families and newborns.
Shereen Nimmo, group director of midwifery, said: “This is a massive achievement and a huge vote of confidence in our doctors and midwives. Safety has always been our top priority and I’m really grateful to colleagues for all their hard work to prove it.”
The maternity incentive scheme was set up in 2018 to spread best practice and meet the target to halve the number of stillbirths, neonatal and maternal deaths by 2025 .
Providers were charged 10% extra on their clinical negligence insurance premiums to fund the scheme, but got the money back if they demonstrated compliance.
As well as being penalised financially, Trusts that failed the annual test were required to submit detailed improvement action plans to get back on track.
We met all the standards in the first year but subsequently faced an ongoing battle to assure the regulator, NHS Resolution, about some of the technical requirements .
These ranged from providing the right range of data about mothers and babies in our care to showing that we had the appropriate number of obstetricians, anaesthetists, midwives and nurses.
The ten safety actions also covered training, governance, listening to service users, reviewing perinatal deaths, and following the Saving Babies Lives Care Bundle.
Caroline Alexander, group chief nurse, said: “Congratulations to all our maternity teams. This has been a particularly challenging exercise for us as a trust because to get these top marks each individual hospital in the group has to achieve a score of 10. Having done it, we can celebrate getting a rebate worth £3m which we will now reinvest in improving services.”
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