This story was first published in digitalhealth.net
Pregnant women to be offered £3,000 ‘birth budget’
NHS England has introduced ‘personal budgets’ for pregnant women worth £3,000, in a bid to overhaul maternity services, and enable women to pick which type of care they want to receive.
Women will be able to use the budget to fund their care, which could involve anything from one-to-one midwifery care to home births, the use of birthing pools and hypnotherapy.
The move has been agreed based on a series of recommendations proposed in a review of maternity care. The review is a response to an inquiry published in 2015, in to the failures that led to the deaths of babies at the University of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust.
The review collected evidence from thousands of families regarding their experience of maternity care, and found they ‘did not always have confidence’ that complications would be picked up or problems investigated properly.
The review outlined a number of issues, including: the numbers of stillbirths and deaths soon after birth have fallen by over a fifth in the past decade to 4.3 and 1.8 per 1,000 births respectively; in half of all stillbirths, there are elements of care that if improved could have made a difference; nearly half of all inspections of maternity services resulted in safety assessments that were classed as either ‘inadequate’ or ‘requires improvement’; and that in about one in 17 births, there are incidents that result in some level of harm to either the baby or the mother.
In order to improve care, it recommended: better data collection; speedier referral when problems arise; and a nationally-agreed way of investigating care that goes wrong.
Conservative peer Baroness Julia Cumberlege, who chaired the report, said: “Women are telling us that one of the things they really want is continuity of the person looking after them, who looks after them through the pregnancy, through the birth and through the aftercare, and we know that's going to make a huge different to safety.”
The system for maternity care is due to be piloted later this year, before a national rollout in 2017.
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