Maternity and Neonatal Safety Improvement Programme

We work with maternity and neonatal units across the East Midlands to improve safety for mothers during pregnancy and ensure preterm babies get the best start in life.

We do this by providing advice and guidance for staff on quality improvement and enable shared learning through safety networks to enable improvements that can lead to a better healthcare experience for all women, babies and their families.

National aims

East Midlands Patient Safety Collaborative (PSC) delivers the Maternity and Neonatal Safety Improvement Programme (MatNeoSIP), led by NHS England.

The programme’s aims are 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%.
• 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 care settings in England.

Key ambitions

• Ensure the effective optimisation and stabilisation of the preterm infant by embedding a pathway of care encompassing seven evidence-based interventions leading to improved health outcomes.
• Ensure the use of the Maternity Early Warning Score (MEWS) tool is embedded within an effective PIER pathway (prevention, identification, escalation, and response) for managing deterioration and support.
• Ensure the use of the New-born Early Warning Trigger and Track (NEWTT2) tool is embedded within an effective PIER pathway for managing deterioration and support.

Current projects

Perinatal Optimisation and Stabilisation of the Preterm Infant

Supporting the implementation of the Antenatal optimisation toolkit – nine actions to improve outcomes.

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Perinatal Deterioration

Supporting the adoption and spread of MEWS and NEWTT2

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Perinatal leadership and culture programme (PCLP)

The national programme to deliver safer and more equitable care to mothers and preterm babies.

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Avoidable Brain Injuries in Childbirth (ABC)

Helping maternity staff better identify signs that the baby is in distress during labour, respond more effectively to obstetric emergencies, and to prevent lifelong conditions like cerebral palsy.

Read more

How to get involved 

We are keen to hear from anyone who:

• would like to know about the Maternity and Neonatal Safety Improvement Programme in the region and ways to get involved;
• would like to know more about the East Midlands Maternity and Neonatal Safety Network;
• is a parent, carer and/or relative, interested in supporting the work of this programme with your experience and involvement; or
• is a health professional and wants to know more about safety culture, quality improvement tools and approaches they could use.

If you would like to get involved with any aspect of East Midland’s patient safety work, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..