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Bring us your experiences of maternity services

The National Maternity Review is led by Baroness Julia Cumberlege. At its latest meeting the review team discussed vital work gathering wide ranging views of maternity services:

The national maternity review is gathering pace.

This week I am thrilled to be visiting Sweden and Denmark with review members to see what we can learn from the innovative approaches to maternity services in these two countries. I will let you know what we discover.

The review’s most recent meeting had some difficult but very important discussions, as well as encouraging updates on our work.

Listening to people’s experience of maternity services and gathering insights from midwives, doctors, nurses, managers, commissioners and other health professionals is absolutely central to the work of the review. For that reason, we have worked hard to create a communications and engagement plan that will help us to have these conversations.

At our latest meeting, the review panel discussed and endorsed the plan, I hope to blog about it in the near future.

We had a challenging but important conversation about how best we can hear the opinions and experiences of those who have had very poor experiences of maternity services. It is important that we help these people to contribute to our review, and we have more work to do on this vital aspect of our work.

Finally, panel members provided updates on the following workstreams:

  • Culture and accountability
  • Models of care
  • Choice
  • Levers and incentives

It was fantastic to see that plans are well underway for each of these areas of work. Look out for more details on this blog in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, if you want to be kept informed about the progress of the review, including receiving details of how you will be able to input and have your voice heard, please send your contact details to england.maternityreview@nhs.net

The National Maternity Review team’s terms of reference were published in March.

Dr Julia Cumberlege

Baroness Julia Cumberlege CBE DL was appointed a Junior Health Minister in 1992 and for five years she covered all Health and Social Services matters in the House of Lords.

She has been commissioned by two Governments to produce two national reports: “Neighbourhood Nursing – a Focus for Care” and “Changing Childbirth”.

At the invitation of the Royal College of Physicians, Julia has chaired two working parties. The first report “Doctors in Society” was published in December 2005. The second, “Future Physician, Changing Doctors in Changing Times”, was published in May 2010.

From 2000 until July 2006, Julia chaired St George’s Medical School.