Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been awarded £208,000 of NHS funds for a successful bid to improve digital maternity services. This money will help to deliver an enhanced experience for maternity service users and staff.
Digital tools are one of the ways we can improve safety, improve reporting, and share information with women and pregnant people and their families so they can feel more supported throughout their pregnancy and maternity journey. Currently our community midwives have laptops, but struggle with connectivity. The money from this bid will enable the team to address this issue and provide individualised care and more accurate data input.
Emma Hardwick, Director of Midwifery at Bedfordshire Hospitals, said: “This funding will make it easier for our midwives and health professionals to collect and share information and data with each other and with the women, birthing people and families in their care. Improvements in technology will help release midwifery time to focus on delivering maternity care.”
The collection of data will be more consistent, reducing staff burden, and overall clinical accuracy will be improved leading to safer care. This consistent data can then inform service planning and reduce health inequalities by undertaking comparisons of the data. It will lead to a greater understanding of our service user’s needs and potentially lead to improved service planning.
Jules Gudgeon, National Digital Midwife Lead for Maternity – NHSEI said:
“With this funding we are one step closer to interoperable record sharing, regardless of location or system used, for the benefit of women and pregnant people and the clinicians caring for them.”