National Maternity Network

Person-centred, safe and high quality care for mothers and babies throughout pregnancy, birth and following birth can have a marked effect on the health and life chances of women and babies and on the healthy development of children throughout their lives.

Scotland's National Maternity Network (NMN) encourages collaboration across maternity and neonatal care services and supports the best possible outcomes for mothers, babies, fathers and partners and their wider families.

Maternity Care in Scotland

In Scotland, ‘maternity’ usually means whole pregnancy, labour and birth and baby’s first few hours or days.

NHS Scotland’s maternity guide is Ready Steady Baby. It’s for everyone looking for information about pregnancy, labour and birth and very early parenthood. There’s also a page about how Covid-19 is affecting the way maternity care is delivered just now.

Royal College for Obstetrics and Gynaecology (RCOG) has some videos for parents about Covid-19 and pregnancy care.

Free Solihull Antenatal Classes (online)

Since women can’t attend antenatal classes just now, the Scottish Government has arranged for Solihull Approach Antenatal online courses to be free.

To register for the course, go to In Our Place (using access code ‘Tartan’). Promotional resources can be found here.

Technology Supporting Maternity Care

Ann Holmes, Chief Midwifery Officer for Scotland, has written a blog about Using technology to support maternity care – during Covid-19 and beyond. For example, more appointments are happening using NHS Near Me video calls, Florence (text messages), BadgerNet (electronic maternity records) and some women and families are being supported to monitor their blood pressure and urine at home.

Facets of Maternity Care

The facets needed to deliver quality care through the National Maternity Network are being developed. This is an early draft.

If you have ideas about the different facets (parts) of maternity care we should include, email your ideas to us at nss.perinatalnetwork@nhs.scot.

Introductory Meetings with Health Boards

The NMN team met (virtually) with senior teams in all 14 Boards between November 2020 and March 2021 and we are delighted to now share the summary of themes and findings from the visits. A common theme from the visits was the opportunity to develop consistent national guidance in a number of key areas. The report was sent to senior teams in all 14 Boards on 13th May 2021, for onward cascading to front-line staff, to gather feedback on the proposed topics for national guidelines and pathways. We also requested volunteers to join a Guidelines Working Group. This will help us ​consider all areas where national guidance may be an improvement on current practice and develop a structured and prioritised programme for ​progressing this.

The NMN team will be working to form our Core Steering Group in the coming months and we hope to present the proposed programme of work to them in the summer, with the view of forming working groups to take this work forward in the autumn.

If you have any questions or would like to be involved in this work, please contact nss.perinatalnetwork@nhs.scot.

 

Antenatal Care and Covid-19

Find more information on our Covid-19 page.