Perinatal Mortality
(asked on 11th January 2018) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he has taken to reduce the occurrence of still-births.
Since the Maternity Safety Action Plan was launched in 2016, more than 90% of trusts have appointed a named board-level maternity safety champion; 136 National Health Service trusts have received a share of an £8.1 million maternity safety training fund and, as of June 2017, more than 12,000 additional staff have received training. The maternal and neonatal health safety collaborative was launched on 28 February 2017 and 44 wave 1 trusts have attended intensive training on quality improvement science and are working on implementing local quality improvement projects with regular visits from a dedicated quality improvement manager; and 25 trusts were successful in their bids for a share of the £250,000 maternity safety innovation fund and have been progressing with their projects to drive improvements in safety.
The majority of maternity care providers are now implementing all four elements of the Saving Babies’ Lives Care Bundle, which recommends four key elements of evidence-based care and practice: 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 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.
On 28 November 2017, my Rt. hon. Friend the Secretary of State published ‘Safer Maternity Care, The National Maternity Safety Strategy - Progress and Next Steps’, which set out a series of additional measures and made clear his intention to bring forward the national ambition to halve the rates of stillbirths, neonatal and maternal deaths and brain injuries that occur during or soon after birth from 2030 to 2025.
From April 2018, every case of a stillbirth, neonatal death, suspected brain injury or maternal death that is notified to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ (RCOG) ‘Each Baby Counts’ programme, about 1,000 incidents annually, will be investigated independently, with a thorough, learning-focused investigation conducted by the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch. The new independent maternity safety investigations will involve families from the outset, and they will have an explicit remit not just to get to the bottom of what happened in an individual instance, but to spread knowledge around the system so that mistakes are not repeated.
In addition, the Department has provided funding for the RCOG to launch 'Each Baby Counts Learn and Support' - a programme of work to enable greater collaboration between the Royal Colleges and the NHS via the Maternal and Neonatal Health Safety Collaborative - the aim is to align quality and safety improvement, multi-professional learning and clinical leadership into a consistent and sustainable safety strategy across the system. The Department is also providing new funding to train health practitioners, such as maternity support workers, to deliver evidence-based smoking cessation according to appropriate national standards.
Further information about the additional measures in place to achieve the ambition and reduce stillbirths can be found here in the National Maternity Safety Strategy: