Maternity work programmes

We support the delivery of high quality healthcare for women and their families during pregnancy, childbirth and the postnatal period across the East Midlands, now and for future generations. We bring together commissioners, providers and stakeholders via our maternity clinical steering group and other work groups. We also act as a critical friend to those organisations who require independent clinical expertise. We aim to improve outcomes and experiences for women and their babies by transforming care within maternity services through the reduction of unwarranted variation of both locally and specialised commissioned services. We are responding to Better Births, the national review of maternity services published in 2016, and supporting women who experience stillbirth, those who have higher risk complex pregnancies and those who require mental health services, working with the mental health network. In addition, we have a work programme to enable a network delivered sustainable fetal medicine service accessible to all women in the East Midlands, which supports care close to home. To ensure that the woman’s voice is central to our work with maternity services East Midlands maternity patient and public involvement workshops were held in 2014 and 2015 and will be progressing this via an East Midlands Maternity Voices Partnership Forum. We will be supporting the national priority actions outlined in Better Births, the National Maternity Review:
  • Support implementation of the national maternity review recommendations
  • Support implementation of the Saving Babies Lives care bundle to reduce stillbirths
  • Support local commissioners and providers to share information, best practice and learning, to benchmark against each other and drive improvement in the quality of services across the region, with a relentless focus on the outcomes of care
  • Support local commissioners and providers in ensuring that specialist services are available to women and babies with more complex needs as close to their homes as possible, and that clear pathways are in place linking maternity, neonatal and paediatric services
  • Work with the clinical commissioning group assessment panel for maternity to provide local intelligence to inform annual assessments, and support those health economies who are rated “requires improvement” or “inadequate” to improve

Our maternity programmes are led by Mr Marwan Habiba, Maternity Clinical Director. Marwan is a consultant gynaecologist at the University Hospitals of Leicester and honorary senior lecturer at the University of Leicester. He became a member of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1991 and a fellow in 2004. He has many publications including on health service delivery and research, medical ethics and abnormal uterine bleeding. We also work with our Obstetric Clinical Lead Dr Lucy Kean, Consultant Obstetrician and Service Lead at Nottingham University Hospitals.