The way maternity and children’s services are delivered is going to have to change, if we want to provide the best possible care for mothers, babies and children, argued Dr Sheila Shribman, the UK’s National Childrens’ Tsar.
“Delivering the best possible services for all women and their babies will mean that changes will have to take place. This is about changing and improving services, not closures or cuts, but sometimes it will mean difficult decisions.”
Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt said: “Mothers and their partners need to be confident that they can choose how and where to have their babies, safe in the knowledge that everyone is working to deliver the safest birth possible in a high quality and responsive service. This report sets out how we can consider developing our maternity services to ensure this is possible everywhere.”
The report details how all women should be offered the choice of a range of services, of a home birth, a midwife led birth or consultant led birth. Added to this, any women giving birth at home should have the assurance that if something goes wrong, she can be transported to a consultant-led unit safely and quickly.
In future, women and their partners will be able to go directly to a midwife, rather than having to approach their GP first. This should mean that women will enter the maternity care system earlier and be able to take advantage of all support and tests such as twelve week scanning and screening.
The guiding principle for maternity services will be that “all women will need a midwife, but some need a doctor too”. This will ensure that midwives will be more widely recognised as the the experts in normal pregnancy and birth and have the skills to refer women or their babies for more specialist care if necessary.
