Policy paper

Safer maternity care: progress and next steps

A review on the implementation of the national maternity safety strategy's safer maternity care action plan.

• From: Department of Health and Social Care
• Published: 28 November 2017

This was published under the 2016 to 2019 May Conservative government

Documents

Safer maternity care: progress and next steps

PDF, 756 KB, 37 pages

Brain injury report for DH – Imperial College London

PDF, 918 KB, 55 pages

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Details

This document reports on progress and next steps with the implementation of the safer maternity care action plan. It sets out additional measures for further and quicker improvement, including:

• improving rigour and quality of investigations into term stillbirths, neonatal and maternal deaths, and serious brain injuries, and learning from the investigations
• more support for maternity and neonatal training
• looking into giving coroners powers to conduct investigations into stillbirths
• aiming to reduce the national rate of pre-term births from 8% to 6%
• bringing forward from 2030 to 2025 the ambition to halve rates of stillbirths, neonatal and maternal deaths, and brain injuries occurring during or soon after birth

The Department of Health commissioned a report from the Neonatal Data Analysis Unit at Imperial College London. The report provides an agreed working definition of brain injuries occurring during or soon after birth, and presents national annual brain injury rates from 2010 to 2015 for England.

Published 28 November 2017