Shaping our maternity and neonatal services for future generations

With this in mind we have undertaken a review to look at maternity and neonatal care (the care of newborn babies) and to make sure parents, babies and their families receive the best possible experience. This is being led by clinicians and we are working collaboratively with health and care organisations across north east London to understand the type of care and support our local people need.

Although our clinicians are experts in these services, we also want to involve families who have used or are using maternity and neonatal services. Their insight, experiences, and ideas are essential to shaping the future.

Our case for change report summarises our findings from the review. It sets out how services currently work, what the needs are likely to be in the future and it also identifies areas for change or where we could do things differently for babies and parents.

This tells us we need to make some changes to maternity and neonatal services and there are opportunities to make sure our services remain safe, high quality and accessible for all.

The report highlights that in north east London we have a growing population, with more complex pregnancies and births. If we continue with the same type of care we currently have, the number of beds we have in the places where care needs to be delivered won’t match the number of people needing them in the future.

There are inequalities that can affect the health of the pregnancy and baby for people from different population groups and that there’s possible changes we can make to maternity and neonatal services to reduce these inequalities.

Our amazing staff work extremely hard to provide safe care, but they are under a great deal of pressure. It’s important that we develop a workforce and model of care that is able to meet the needs of our population.

We want to understand if the report and its findings reflect the experiences of local people, and what matters most to them. We’re calling on them to share their feedback now through our online survey by 8 September 2024.

We have not proposed any solutions, and no decisions have been made about these services.

We understand how important it is to involve local people, their families, staff and stakeholders to help us to gather further ideas and understanding that can help shape these key services. It is our commitment to continue to work collaboratively with all these partners to ensure we provide the best care to parents, babies and their families.

Diane Jones,
Chief Nursing Officer, NHS North East London