UK Maternity Care at a Crossroads Calls for Urgent Reform and Sustainable Investment – RCOG
Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists | RCOG shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Two excellent articles published recently in the British Medical Journal exploring the complexities surrounding UK maternity care.
In their article ‘NHS maternity care: the system generates demand it cannot meet’, Professor Steve Thornton and colleagues’ highlight the growing pressures facing NHS maternity services and the urgent need for maternity infrastructure to reflect modern clinical practice. The issues reflect the reality for those on the maternity front line, with services are under unprecedented strain.
The opinion piece by Charlotte Bevan, Professor Marian Knight and Rachel Rowe provides an equally powerful exploration of the challenge and asks whether ‘the intense spotlight on ever increasing risk assessment …is leading to unintended consequences that are themselves impacting maternity care safety’. The authors advocate for a system focused on learning from the breath of staff and family experiences, both when things ‘have gone catastrophically wrong, but also from the myriad positive experiences and outcomes that happen every day in maternity’.
Last week, the RCOG contributed to a BBC investigation exploring rising emergency caesarean rates, now 25% of all births in England. This shift is pertinent to the issues raised in both BMJ pieces. As a system, we need to better understand changing birth trends, supported by good data collection and good birth conversations, and ensure services are supported to adapt to offer safe, personalised care to every woman and baby today and in the future.
The College is committed to supporting maternity care improvements, and urges governments, policymakers and commissioners to act together to ensure maternity services have sufficient allocations of workforce, finances, beds/cots and obstetric theatre capacity. Safe care depends on supported, motivated teams, yet current pressures make this increasingly difficult to sustain, with the RCOG 2025 census showing nearly two thirds of doctors working beyond contracted hours and one in five intending to leave the profession in the next five years.
The National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation report is due later this month, and must mark the turning point, with the system aligned behind a clear, united action plan. Rapid improvements need to be underpinned with sufficient, sustained investment to deliver real change. Every family, and every maternity staff member, deserves this.
‘NHS maternity care: the system generates demand it cannot meet’
Safer maternity care requires learning from the full breadth of staff and family experiences.”
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