Three Year Delivery Plan for Maternity and Neonatal Services 

On 30 March 2023 NHS England published its three year delivery plan for maternity and neonatal services.

The plan sets out a series of actions for Trusts, ICBs and NHS England in order to improve the safety and quality of maternity and neonatal services with a focus on personalised care and equity and equality.

It combines a number of existing maternity and neonatal requirements including the original Better Births (2016) report, the Long Term Plan (2019), Ockenden (2020 and 2022), East Kent (2022), Saving Babies Lives Care Bundle v2, CSNT requirements, MBRRACE reports, BAPM7 neonatal ambitions and equity/race related guidance. 

The report sets out the 12 priority actions for Trusts and systems for the next three years, across four themes:

• Listening to women and families with compassion
• Supporting the workforce
• Developing and sustaining a culture of safety
• Meeting and improving standards and structures.

Personalisation and Choice in Maternity Care  

Personal care is safe care. It means listening to women and birthing people, understanding what they want and what they need and putting in place a personal care plan. The more we centre care around each individual woman and birthing person, the safer that care will be.

To support choice, we need to ensure that HCPs provide reliable, consistent, and objective information on which to enable informed decisions, and support women and birthing people to understand their options – including the potential risks and benefits of different approaches.

The Humber and North Yorkshire Pregnancy and Birth Personal Care Plans (PCP) document was published in Spring 2021 in response to the NHSE/I target, as set out in the Personalised Care and Support Planning Guidance , to ensure that every pregnant woman and birthing person in England is offered a PCP by March 2022.

You will find the PCP page on the LMS website here, and a link to an animation for staff giving more detail on the PCP  document and how it should be used is available here . 

At present, the PCP can be downloaded to print or is accessible as an editable pdf to be completed digitally.

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In February 2016, Better Births  set out the Five Year Forward View for NHS maternity services in England. Better Births recognised that delivering such a vision could only be delivered through locally led transformation, suitably supported at national and regional levels.

On 7 January 2019, the NHS long-term plan (formerly known as the 10-year plan) was published setting out key ambitions for the service over the next 10 years.  There is a dedicated section detailing the ambitions for maternity and neonatal services . 

A suite of videos aimed at supporting professionals to have choice discussions with women and their partners are linked to below

You can find data about the following maternity related issues here: 

• Smoking At Time Of Delivery statistics
• Maternity Incentive Scheme linked to the Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts (CNST)
• Maternity Services Monthly Statistics
• CQC Maternity Services Survey 2022

Multilingual pregnancy information resources from a range of organisations including the MAMA Academy, Public Health England, Obstetric Anaesthetists' Association, UNICEF and GOV.UK can be accessed here . 

Information to support Afghan refugees has been collated by Stockport MVP and can be accessed here and Maternity Service principles checklist for the care of pregnant women arriving from Afghanistan was published on 10 September 2021.  

The Maternity Stream of Sanctuary (part of City of Sanctuary) launched a resource pack in January 2022. The aim of the resource pack is to promote a culture of welcome within maternity services for people seeking sanctuary in the UK, it has been developed for use by midwives, student midwives, obstetricians, GPs, health visitors and others within the community who support families seeking sanctuary during the journey from pregnancy to parenthood. City of Sanctuary want to raise awareness of some of the issues facing families and help people access the information they need.