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Part one: Safer maternity care – CNST premium incentivisation

Details

The Government has set a target of halving the rates of stillbirths, neonatal and maternal deaths, and brain injuries associated with delivery, by 2025. The first milestone in the process of achieving that target is an expectation of a 20% reduction by 2020.

In order to incentivise improvement in the delivery of best practice, NHS Resolution will be making a 10% (at least) reduction in the CNST maternity contributions of trusts who are able to demonstrate compliance with the 10 criteria agreed by the National Maternity Champions.

Trusts who cannot demonstrate full compliance may be eligible for a smaller discount providing that savings are used to take action towards meeting the criteria.

NHS Resolution has built provision for an incentive fund into its pricing for 2018/19.

The 10 criteria are as follows:

  1. Use of the National Perinatal Mortality Review Tool to review perinatal deaths
  2. Submitting data to the Maternity Services Data Set to the required standard
  3. Demonstrating transitional care facilities are in place and operational to support implementation of the ATAIN programme
  4. Demonstrating an effective system of medical workforce planning
  5. Demonstrating an effective system of midwifery workforce planning
  6. Demonstrating compliance with the four elements of the Saving Babies’ Lives Care Bundle
  7. Demonstrating a patient feedback mechanism for maternity services, such as the Maternity Voices Partnership forum, and regularly acting on feedback
  8. Evidencing that 90% of each maternity staff group have attended an in-house multi-professional maternity emergencies training session within the last training year
  9. Demonstrating that trust safety champions are meeting bi-monthly with board level champions to escalate locally identified issues
  10. Reporting 100% of qualifying 2017/18 incidents under NHS Resolution Early Notification scheme

The benefit in terms of patient safety and the financial incentivisation mean it is extremely important that trusts with maternity departments immediately determine with whom the responsibility for ensuring compliance will rest and start to develop action plans for hitting the specified targets.

This welcome proposal should be seen as part of a wider focus on maternity care, with a range of initiatives recently announced. The measure particularly reinforces the importance of compliance with the Early Notification scheme.

View part two: safer maternity care – CNST premium incentive scheme

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