NHS consultation offers a chance to shape maternity and neonatal care
Members of the public as well as NHS staff and expert organisations have been invited to share their NHS experiences and ideas to help shape the Government’s new 10 Year Health Plan.
Tommy’s are determined to keep maternity and neonatal services high on the agenda in the new plan, and will be calling for the following in our consultation response:
- The Government must officially count every miscarriage in the UK
Right now, we don’t know the true scale of baby loss in the UK because crucially, miscarriages and losses that occur up to 24 weeks of pregnancy are not counted or recorded by the NHS. This is key to getting parents the research and support they desperately need to drive change.
It's estimated that there are 300-400 miscarriages each day in the UK – but this is only an underestimate based on available data. This is despite recommendations in the Independent Pregnancy Loss Review (2023) to introduce better ways of recording of miscarriage data in the NHS. The government must count and record all miscarriages.
- Every person who experiences baby loss should receive the best care from the NHS irrespective of geography, socio economic status or ethnicity
We know that at least 50% of the population have been impacted by baby loss in some way. Every day there are an estimated 300-400 miscarriages, 8 stillbirths, 5 neonatal deaths and 145 babies born too early. These statistics are worse if you are from a more deprived community and or if you are a woman or birthing person of Black and Black mixed heritage. In England and Wales, babies from the Black ethnic group continued to have the highest stillbirth rate of 6.5 per 1,000 births, compared with 3.5 for the White ethnic group. The stillbirth rate in the Asian ethnic group is 4.7 per 1,000 births.
This must change. The 10 Year Health Plan must set the foundations for a comprehensive programme of improvement to tackle inequalities in maternity outcomes by ethnicity and deprivation - focused on ensuring the NHS delivers safe, high-quality maternity and neonatal care for all.
- The 10 Year Health Plan must provide appropriate support and graded specialist care to women and birthing people from their first loss.
Right now, parents have to go through three miscarriages before they qualify for support and are able to get support and specialist care. We believe this is unacceptable and needs to change.
Each miscarriage matters, it’s not “just one of those things”. Women and birthing people should be able to access support and personalised care after even one miscarriage, especially those that are at higher risk, including Black women and those who are over 40 years old.
Tommy’s National Centre for Miscarriage Research is piloting a new system known as the Graded Model of care, where care and support is offered after every miscarriage, with testing and investigations increasing with each loss. We want the government to invest in rolling this programme out UK-wide.
The consultation closes on Monday 2 December, and we need members of the public to add weight behind these calls.
You can do this by visiting the NHS Consultation website and sharing your experiences via this form. We would be grateful if you could use the text above when completing the form.
Most importantly, we encourage you to share any specific experiences you may have about:
- Whether you have experienced pregnancy or baby loss, and the care you received via the NHS.
- If you have experienced a miscarriage, were you told you needed to wait until you had been through three miscarriages before receiving any further care or support?
Since the Government was elected in July, Tommy’s have been hard at work to raise the profile of pregnancy and baby loss in Westminster.
Our engagement in the NHS consultation builds on a number of activities including welcoming Health Minister Baroness Merron to the Tommy’s National Centre for Miscarriage Research where she was able to hear first-hand from patients about the support and care provided by staff at the centre after they had experienced miscarriage and how this had supported successful subsequent pregnancies.
Our Chief Executive, Kath Abrahams, was among charity leaders invited to meet Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, and other ministers from the Department for Health and Social Care to hear about their priorities for the NHS.
Earlier this month, we also co-hosted an event in parliament attended by over 50 MPs alongside Sands and our Joint Policy Unit, with the aim to make pregnancy and baby loss the political priority it needs to be.
Dr Jyotsna Vohra, Tommy’s Director of Research, Programmes and Impact, said:
“We welcome the Government’s move to listen and learn from service users as well as from NHS clinicians and managers, to ensure positive and lasting change.
“We would urge all of our supporters to engage in the consultation. In particular, we need people to share their experiences of maternal and neonatal care to shape these services within the NHS for the next 10 years and beyond and to help save more babies’ lives.”
We’re encouraged that the Government is in ‘listening mode’, but we know words are not enough.
We need your support to continue this momentum with the new government, and to shape the future of NHS maternal and neonatal services for the next 10 years.