In its new annual report, Kernow Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnership (KMNVP) highlights how improvements in maternity and neonatal services can be achieved when those who provide care value the experience and expertise of those they serve.
KMNVP engages with maternity and neonatal service users from across Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly and represents their views by working with care providers and decision makers to design, develop and improve maternity and neonatal care at a local and national level.
In 2023-24, KMNVP sat alongside maternity and neonatal professionals on over 30 regular strategic planning and decision-making meetings and co-production project groups. The broad range of topics covered included patient safety and quality surveillance, birth planning and choices, perinatal mortality, birth trauma, multiple births, maternal mental health, perinatal pelvic health, parenting support, infant feeding, equity and access to services.
In addition, KMNVP focused their work last year on some key projects and engagement activities:
- Personalised Maternity Care and Support: KMNVP brought local service users and professionals together to coproduce a revised, more accessible, Personalised Maternity Care Plan to help people make informed decisions about their care.
- Kernow Parenting Journey: KMNVP collaborated with partners and service users to develop and coproduce a new approach to providing accessible and effective information and support for local parents, including a new antenatal programme offering face-to-face support and new digital resources including videos and a website.
- 15 Steps to providing quality maternity care: KMNVP visited Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust with staff, volunteers, service users and midwives, to carry out their annual ’15 Steps for Maternity Challenge’. They used NHS England’s 15 Steps process to evaluate maternity services and recommended actions to support change and improvement.
- Neonatal care: KMNVP gathered feedback from people who had received care from the neonatal unit or transitional care ward at RCHT and reported back to the neonatal leadership team at the RCHT. This resulted in the Trust developing personalised maternity outreach for people who have just given birth, even if they are on the neonatal unit with their baby; and a project to minimise separation of babies from parents and swift and compassionate communication when separation is unavoidable.
- Multiple births: The KMNVP team brought service users and professionals together to share experiences, feedback and ideas to help shape RCHT’s new specialist care pathway for multiple births.
- New national MNVP guidance: KMNVP supported NHS Cornwall and Isles of Scilly ICB and NHS England to develop new guidance, providing a national framework for Local Maternity and Neonatal Systems to effectively commission and set up a MNVP.
Susan Bracefield, Chief Nursing Officer, NHS Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Integrated Care Board, highlighted the value of KMNVP’s work, commenting: “Kernow Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnership is a key player within our system, capturing the voices of local people and ensuring they influence how services are delivered, and this annual report describes many great examples. Their success is recognised at a national level, as seen in the recent all party parliamentary review on birth trauma and in the recently published national guidance for MNVPs. Nationally, maternity and neonatal services have continued to receive a high level of scrutiny through a series of national reports and publicity. A key theme from these reports puts listening to and working with women and families at the heart of improvements that need to be made. NHS Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Integrated Care Board highly values the role of KMNVP in making this a great strength in Cornwall.”
Announcing the annual report, Nicki Burnett, Senior Lead for Kernow Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnership, said: “We’re proud of what we have achieved by working with local people and partners and I want to thank everyone who has shared their experience and supported our work. As we move forward, we renew our commitment to the families of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly that we will champion your voice, be vocal about the need for equitable and accessible services for the most marginalised and vulnerable families in our communities and use what you share with us to support the oversight and assurance of quality care.”
Read the full Kernow Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnership Annual Report 2023-24
To keep up to date with KMNVPs work or to share your experience of local maternity services:
- Visit: Kernow Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnership
- Subscribe to the KMNVP newsletter
- Email the team and follow KMNVP on social media: Facebook | Instagram | X