This week North Cumbria Integrated NHS Foundation Trust (NCIC) has launched the first of a new Maternity Continuity of Care team to offer a more personalised maternity experience for women.
The new way of working will ensure that each pregnant mum will receive care from her own dedicated team of midwives which will give the assurance of a midwife she knows for the birth of her baby. While the Trust currently aims to do this it is not always possible and this new model of service delivery will go some way to addressing this.
The team of midwives will be able to deliver an even more personalised service to women and families within their care.
The scheme is part of the national Maternity Transformation Programme which sets out a clear vision for maternity services to become, safer, more personalised, professional and family friendly.
Julie Tiffen is the Project Lead Midwife for Continuity of Carer scheme at NCIC and has been working on implementing the project. She said:
“Here in Carlisle we are very excited to be launching our first phase of the midwife continuity of carer scheme. We’ll be working with a small number of women in the Carlisle area who already attend our clinics with a view to this being rolled out later to other areas within north Cumbria.
“We’re starting with a team of six midwives called the “Caldew team” who work together to ensure that the mothers they are responsible for have information and support that is right for them and their baby. Within the team women will have a named midwife and a buddy midwife, they will also hopefully get a chance to meet the other midwives within the Caldew team during their pregnancy. There won’t be any change as to where mothers attend for their care currently.
“Together the team will provide more personalised care in pregnancy, labour and birth and they will also be able to access the full range of specialist support for women as is identified during this period.”
The Continuity of Care project is part of a government initiative that is aiming nationally for 35% of women at 29 weeks of pregnancy to be part of a Continuity Pathway by March 2021. The ambition is to halve the rates of stillbirths, neonatal mortality and maternal mortality.