11 July 2017

Shropshire’s maternity service has been awarded almost £60,000 to deliver training to improve safety.

The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SaTH) which runs the service was awarded £59,882 from Health Education England’s (HEE) Maternity Safety Training Fund.

Nationally more than £8million has been distributed to 136 NHS Trusts, including all 134 acute Trusts with maternity units.

Sarah Jamieson, Head of Midwifery at SaTH, said: “We’re delighted to have received such a generous proportion of this Safety Training Fund.  This will allow us to deliver more training that will focus on patient safety, team working and communication.

“This training fund will help us to continue to learn and improve, and to ensure that we enable our Maternity staff, who work tirelessly to provide the safest and kindest care, to do so with the best training available.” 

Lisa Bayliss-Pratt, Director of Nursing and Deputy Director of Education and Quality at HEE added: “The response from service providers and partners in applying to make maternity services safer through education and training has been excellent.

“I am delighted that the trust has been awarded an allocation from the fund to progress their training and safety improvements, helping to make maternity services safer for mothers and babies, and enhance their care experience.”

Nationally, the funding will allow Trusts to implement packages of multi-disciplinary training, focusing on the key patient safety improvement areas of maternity team leadership, multi-professional team working and communication, human factors training, fetal growth and monitoring, plus midwifery, obstetric and CTG skills and drills.

At SaTH, the funding will be used to:

  • Invest in a new intrapartum acuity tool, including training support and updates, which will enable the Trust to measure acuity and activity within the Delivery Suite at the Shropshire Women and Children’s Centre at PRH and in other areas.
  • Provide a birthing pool safety training study day for approximately 60 midwives.
  • Provide perinatal training for approximately 60 midwives and obstetricians.
  • Support around 38 Women’s Services Assistants (WSAs) through training in the recognition of sick postnatal and neonatal babies.
  • Invest in a maternal critical care course for a number of Midwives who work on the Delivery Suite in the Shropshire Women and Children’s Centre.
  • Provide Baby Lifeline training.
  • Invest in further updates for PROMPT (PRactical Obstetric Multi-Professional Training) 3, which is a multi-disciplinary course for midwives and doctors.
  • Invest in further leadership programmes for approximately 60 staff, including obstetricians, midwives and maternity support workers.
  • Invest further in ROBuST courses covering care during Caesarean Sections and forceps or ventouse delivery.

Training programmes are due to be completed by March 2018 and HEE will commission an independent evaluation to assess how NHS Trusts have improved quality and safety within maternity services and the wider impact for mothers and babies, families, and the maternity workforce.

Working with the national Maternity Transformation Programme partners, HEE is supporting the multi-professional training recommendations from the 2016 National Maternity Review report: ‘Better Births – Improving outcomes for maternity services in England’ and ensuring maternity safety education and training materials are available for maternity units across England.

HEE has committed to ensure that training supports a culture of continuous learning and improvement in safe services, with a focus on reducing the rates of stillbirths, neonatal and maternity deaths and other adverse outcomes such as sepsis and intrapartum brain injuries. This funding supports the ambition to make NHS maternity services among the safest in the world and reduce the number of stillbirths, neonatal deaths, maternal deaths and brain injuries that occur during or soon after birth by 20% by 2020 and by 50% by 2030.