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The Safer Births programme enabled frontline professionals working in maternity units to improve the safety of the services they deliver to women and their babies.

Project content

  • Improving safety in maternity services

    The tips and tools in this resource will help maternity teams to implement changes that will deliver benefits to women and families.

  • Staffing in maternity units: getting the right people in the right place at the right time

    Following on from our previous inquiry into the safety of maternity services, we commissioned further research to consider the impact of using staff efficiently.

  • Safe Births: Everybody's business

    This report presents the findings of an independent inquiry into the safety of maternity services in England, offering recommendations for change.

About the Safer Births programme

We worked with maternity teams across the country to improve the outcome of care during labour and birth for mothers and babies. Using a range of techniques, from bespoke management consultancy to mentoring opportunities with other NHS trusts, we provided custom support to 12 multi-disciplinary maternity teams.

About Safer Births

While the overwhelming majority of births in England are safe, the lack of a systematic approach to ensuring safety across maternity services is creating unnecessary risks.

There is evidence of local activity to improve safety in maternity services, but it is often small scale and fragmented. The challenge facing maternity units is to make systemic changes in care that are sustainable to ensure that safe care is reliably delivered.

In 2008 the report of the independent inquiry commissioned by The King's Fund, Safe Births: Everybody's business, and the Healthcare Commission's review of maternity services, Towards Better Births, identified similar areas in need of improvement, including staffing, training and communication. Together with a number of other reports, guidance documents and reviews over the past few years, they identified the challenges for maternity services and set out recommendations. The Safer Births programme followed on from these developments as a service improvement programme that aimed to improve the safety of maternity services in England. The goal of the programme was to enable frontline professionals working in maternity units to improve the safety of their services that they deliver to women and their babies.

The Safer Births initiative was a partnership between The King's Fund, Royal College of Midwives, Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, Centre for Maternal and Child Enquiries, NHS Litigation Authority and the National Patient Safety Agency.

Our work

The goal of the Safer Births programme was to enable frontline professionals working in maternity units to improve the safety of their services that they deliver to women and their babies.

We worked intensively with 12 maternity teams as part of an improvement network launched in September 2009. The aim of the network was to improve the outcomes of care during labour and birth for mothers and babies.

From September 2009 the Safer Births initiative provided customised support to 12 multidisciplinary maternity teams in England as part of a service improvement network.

This included:

  • bespoke management consultancy support

  • project management input

  • access to the expertise, tools and activities of the Safer Births partners

  • face-to-face networking and learning opportunities for networking via regional action learning sets

  • mentoring opportunities with other NHS trusts/foundation trusts

  • access to national learning events

  • facilitated MaPSaF workshops

  • access to educational webinars.

Programme team and partners

Project videos and staff stories