The maternity and neonatal professions include, but are not limited to, the following highly trained professionals across maternity services: midwives, maternity support workers, neonatal nurses, and medical workforce including fetal medicine, paediatricians, obstetricians, anaesthetists, and neonatologists and our colleagues from Allied Health Professionals and Primary Care.
Our regional vision is to have the current and future maternity workforce with the right skills in the right place to deliver high-quality maternity care, supporting the maternity workforce to play its important role in improving population health across the SE.
HEE support maternity staff to adapt, learn and improve their practice to support the target of 50% reductions in stillbirth, maternal mortality, neonatal mortality and serious brain injury by 2025 outlined in the NHS Long Term Plan.
We work across Local Maternity and Neonatal Systems (LMNSs) to support workforce transformation in practice. The South East region LMNSs include Kent and Medway, Sussex, Frimley, Surrey Heartlands, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West, Southampton, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.
Our team commissions education and training, supports our maternity workforce with innovative solutions to workforce challenges and leads on regional and national projects.
If you would like to contact the South East Maternity Team, please email Maternity Programme (South East) MP-SE@hee.nhs.uk
Maternity and neonatal care have been the focus of several reviews over the last few years including:
- Ockenden Report 2022 – Learning of lessons and embedding meaningful change
- Better Births 2016 – Improving outcomes of maternity services in England
- Maternity Workforce Strategy 2019 – Transforming the Maternity Workforce
- Implementing the Recommendations of the Neonatal Critical Care Review 2019
- The NHS Long Term Plan aims to halve neonatal deaths by 2025.
These documents form the basis of HEE work, both nationally and locally.
Areas of development for HEE SE Maternity team include registered midwife expansion, continuity of carer for pregnant women, Preceptorship, and maternity support worker development.