Saturday Services among antenatal care and cultural improvements in Nottingham maternity services
A renewed focus on antenatal care and experience is delivering improvements for both women during their pregnancy, and staff at Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH).
Identified as an area where improvements were necessary, colleagues at NUH have been focusing on antennal care with a number of elements of progress highlighted to the Chair of the Independent Maternity Review (IMR) as part of the regular feedback and improvements meetings held at the Trust on Tuesday 19 November.
Areas of development included:
- The introduction of more out of hours clinics on Saturdays in order to better support partners to be a part of the pregnancy journey, enabling them to attend more screening appointments, as well as to allow for more opportunities to offer vaccinations to pregnant women and to provide more tests for gestational diabetes.
- Improvements to administration processes within antenatal services that are increasing the number of clinic appointments and digital handovers to support the timely handover of antenatal patients to other areas.
- The investment in four new ultrasound scanning machines for the midwife sonography team and a further new ultrasound machine for the Trust’s fetal medicine team to help early diagnosis of fetal conditions.
This progress comes the month after the Trust opened its doors to a brand-new £1.4million Fetal Medicine Unit at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham. The new unit which has been a number of years in planning, offers a more modern, spacious and appropriate dedicated space for fetal services including three scanning rooms with ultrasound capability, a treatment room, four consultation rooms, and a dedicated waiting room for families coming for a Fetal Medicine appointment. It also includes a staff kitchen and offices.
Director of Midwifery at NUH, Sharon Wallis said:
“Getting antenatal care right first time is really important, and we want pregnant women to know that we are here for them throughout their pregnancy journey. We’ve got further to go, but have made demonstrable progress in a number of areas to improve the accessibility of antenatal services and to modernise our environment and working practices, and I want to thank all colleagues involved for their hard work and determination to deliver these changes.
Further steps taken on culture and inclusivity
Elsewhere the Trust continues to work to improve the culture within services and with the community that it serves. In response to feedback from the independent review team and directly from mother and birthing people, the Trust’s Inclusive Maternity Work Programme promotes inclusivity within maternity services by recognising and respecting the diverse needs and experiences of women/birthing people, staff and the communities we serve with the aim of reducing Health Inequalities and making maternity services inclusive by 2025.
As part of the approach on inclusivity, maternity leaders are going directly to community groups to listen to and engage with women about their birth experiences and expectations. Since rolling out the programme, senior midwifery and consultant colleagues have met with women at the Muslim Women’s Network, Heya and Mojatu with more sessions planned later in the year.
The trust has also introduced cultural awareness training as part of the mandatory training programme for Midwifery colleagues and Maternity Support Workers. Following positive feedback, the course is now being developed into a full day-long Cultural Awareness training day with input from the Maternity Neonatal Voices Partnership.