Tommy's Birmingham centre to help pave the way towards better maternity care
The Government has established The Maternity Transformation Programme which is working to implement the recommendations of the Better Lives Report – the aim is to improve antenatal services by giving parents more choice about where they give birth and importantly making pregnancy and birth safer for everyone. An important part of making changes in the NHS is to test them in a few areas, learn about how it works in practice, before rolling out to all of the NHS.
Seven areas have been selected to test how better care might be delivered in pregnancy and these are:
Birmingham and Solihull
Cheshire and Merseyside
Dorset
North Central London
North West London
Somerset
Surrey Heartlands
We’re delighted that one of the test areas is in Birmingham where Tommy’s newest centre focusing on early miscarriage is based.
So what’s going to be different?
- Using small teams of midwives to offer greater continuity of care to women – it is hoped that your midwife getting to know you better will improve the care you receive and help identify any potential problems much sooner.
- Creating single points of access to a wider range of maternity services – this will give your midwife easier access to a wide range of experts who can help you in your pregnancy.
- Making better use of electronic records to provide more joined up care – this will help the health professionals caring for you to understand more about your total health care needs not just your pregnancy health needs.
- Improving postnatal care – this should give parents greater support as they adjust to parenting a baby.
- Providing better personalised care planning – this should give parents greater choice about where they give birth whether that’s in an obstetric unit, a midwifery led unit or at home.
The changes are designed to help reduce stillbirth and neonatal death and there is evidence from other countries that continuity of care (seeing the same midwife) has reduced pre-term birth so we’ll keep you updated about progress with this exciting initiative.
Read more our miscarriage centre
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A parent turned to me and said, "You are so lucky you don't have twins."
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Yoga shown to keep pregnancy stress-free
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Our quest to get amazing independent documentary Still Loved continues…
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Harvard-trained psychologist shares her thoughts on the 'Emotional weight of miscarriage'
Read more pregnancy in the news
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Miscarriage caused Hollyoaks actor to ask to be removed from stillbirth storyline
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Image
A parent turned to me and said, "You are so lucky you don't have twins."
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Image
Yoga shown to keep pregnancy stress-free
-
Image
Our quest to get amazing independent documentary Still Loved continues…
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Harvard-trained psychologist shares her thoughts on the 'Emotional weight of miscarriage'
Tommy’s news
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Miscarriage caused Hollyoaks actor to ask to be removed from stillbirth storyline
Ayden Callaghan, who plays Joe Roscoe in Hollyoaks, asked producers to remove him from the heartbreaking stillbirth scenes after his wife had a miscarriage -
A parent turned to me and said, "You are so lucky you don't have twins."
After losing one of her twin daughters shortly after birth, Millie Smith decided to launch a scheme that uses stickers in neonatal wards to identify babies who have lost their siblings. -
Yoga shown to keep pregnancy stress-free
Mothers who have gone to antenatal yoga classes will probably not be surprised to learn that recent research we’ve carried out in Manchester shows that it can reduce stress and lessen anxiety during pregnancy. -
Our quest to get amazing independent documentary Still Loved continues…
Help us end the silence around baby loss and get this film to the silver screen.