This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
East Cheshire, Greater Manchester
Patient Safety Collaborative - Maternity and Neonatal

As a key component of the NHS Patient Safety Strategy, the National Patient Safety Improvement Programmes address the most important safety issues and embed improvement methods and measurement into systems
The 15 national Patient Safety Collaboratives (PSCs) will support Integrated Care Systems (ICS’s) to deliver the national programmes
In Greater Manchester and Eastern Cheshire (GMEC) the Maternity and Neonatal Safety Improvement Programme (MatNeoSIP) is delivered by Health Innovation Manchester (HInM) under the leadership of Stuart Kaill (Senior Programme Development Lead), Caroline Finch (Programme Development Lead) and Rebecca Williams (Project Manager)
MatNeoSIP aims to:
- Contribute to the national ambition set out in Better Births, to reduce the rates of maternal and neonatal deaths, stillbirths and brain injuries that occur during or soon after birth by 50% by 2025
- Contribute to the national ambition, set out in Safer Maternity Care, to reduce the national rate of preterm births from 8% to 6% by 2025
- Improve the safety and outcomes of maternal and neonatal care by reducing unwarranted variation and provide a high-quality healthcare experience for all women, babies, and families across maternity and neonatal settings.
The programme focuses on three areas of improvement:
- To improve the optimisation and stabilisation of the preterm infant
- Early recognition and management of deterioration of women and babies
- Providing ongoing support to the Perinatal Culture and Leadership Programme
Areas of Improvement
All nine of GMEC Local Maternity and Neonatal System (LMNS) providers will be supported by HInM to deliver on the NHSE (NHS England) commissioned safety improvement work. Supporting the teams and working with key system stakeholders who are focussed on the safe, personal, and effective care of our birthing people and their families. The GMEC PSC (Patient Safety Collaborative) approach to the delivery of the MatNeoSIP is as follows
We are collaborating with the Quality Improvement Lead Nurse for the Northwest Neonatal Operational Delivery Network (NWNODN).
We will continue to work directly with optimisation teams to deliver and embed the nine key evidenced based preterm perinatal optimisation interventions that are proven to improve outcomes.
There is compelling evidence that babies who receive all the appropriate aspects of the interventions have improved outcomes. The British Association of Perinatal Medicine (BAPM) have released a perinatal quality improvement (QI) package to support maternity and neonatal providers to implement. Further information can be found here.
We took a regional approach and delivered an Optimisation Study Day on 29th November in collaboration with the Quality Improvement Lead Nurse for the Northwest Neonatal Operational Delivery Network, and the Senior Programme Manager for Health Innovation Northwest Coast with the focus being on:
- Perinatal communication
- Antenatal communication
- Workshop to discuss the new neuro protective Fi-Care accreditation standards for antenatal care
Presentations included:
- Steroids
- Equity and equality data
- Parents experiences
- Simulation of a Perinatal Optimisation Group (POG)
We have been supporting our local optimisation teams to implement the interventions since April 2021 and we are seeing an improvement in the data across GMEC.
Further information can be found on our FutureNHS page
For our up to date leaflet ‘Improving the outcome for preterm babies: information for parents’ click here.
Maternity Early Warning Score (MEWS)
This involves ensuring the use of the national Maternity Early Warning Score tool is implemented within an effective PIER pathway for managing early recognition and management of deterioration in birthing people. Early implementation was initially within providers who do not have a digital system for recording maternal observations
Currently we have MEWS implemented in two of our providers in GMEC
- East Cheshire NHS Trust who was the first maternity provider to implement nationally.
- Tameside and Glossop Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust
We have taken a regional approach with Health Innovation Northwest Coast and working collaboratively with all our maternity and neonatal providers.
The national patient safety team have launched three MEWS podcasts which describe how the tool has been developed, discuss the benefits of a standardised approach to reduce variation and discusses feedback from pilot of the tool.
Podcast One: Maternity Early Warning Score – Podcast 1 by NHS England
Podcast Two: Maternity Early Warning Score – Podcast 2 by NHS England
Podcast Three: National Maternity Early Warning Score : Podcast 3 by NHS England
Newborn Early Warning Score Trigger and Track (NEWTT2)
This involves ensuring the NEWTT2 is embedded within an effective PIER pathway for managing deterioration with the aim of improved recognition of deterioration that can leads to interventions and admission the neonatal unit. Early implementation was aimed at providers who do not have a digital system for recording neonatal observations
Further information on NEWTT2 can be found here
Currently we have NEWTT2 implemented in
- East Cheshire NHS Trust
- Tameside and Glossop Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust
- Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Additional resources can be found with our FutureNHS workspace.
The National Maternity and Neonatal Programme have commissioned the PSCs to support QUAD (Quadrumvirate) teams to continue the work undertaken as part of PCLP.
The PCLP has been designed to support perinatal leadership teams to create and craft the conditions for a positive culture of safety and continuous improvement, have a positive impact on the experiences of women, families and babies and enable a more collaborative, supportive workplace. The PCLP has also aims to enable a psychological safe working environment and develop compassionate leadership to make work a better place to be.
With the continued support from the National Maternity and Neonatal team the PSC will provide local level support for providers to enable them to continue building on improvement planning with a focus on developing relationships and collaboration across the perinatal team and realise their culture improvement plans.
Expected outcomes
- Improvement in safety and culture at Trust and system level as defined by local plans and system agreement.
- Improved staff satisfaction/experience for those working in maternity and neonatal services
- Improved outcomes for women and babies because of good perinatal safety culture
View the Perinatal Culture and Leadership Programme driver diagram
For more information regarding the Maternity and Neonatal Safety Improvement Programme please contact Caroline Finch caroline.finch@healthinnovationmanchester.com.
To keep up to date with the latest information please join our FuturesNHS page
Impact

Blogs
Improving equity, diversity and inclusion in our maternity and neonatal workforce – Caroline Finch
Reflective blog from the Local Neonatal Unit Away Day – Caroline Finch