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<p>My Rt. hon. Friend the Secretary of State is committed to reducing the rates of
stillbirth in England and improving maternity outcomes for women and babies. In November
2015, he announced a national ambition to halve the rates of stillbirths, neonatal
and maternal deaths and brain injuries that occur during or soon after birth by 2030.
The Safer Maternity Care: next steps towards the national maternity ambition, published
in October 2016, then set out a suite of initiatives, including actions to tackle
issues of culture, leadership, and learning, in order to improve safety in maternity
units and the outcomes and experience of care for mothers and babies.</p><p>The action
plan included the Saving Babies’ Lives Care Bundle which is designed to support midwives
and other clinicians to identify risks and implement care to prevent stillbirths and
neonatal deaths in a focused way. The four interventions included in the Care Bundle
are:</p><p> </p><p>- Reducing Smoking In Pregnancy;</p><p>- Detecting Fetal Growth
Restriction;</p><p>- Raising Awareness Of Reduced Fetal Movement; and</p><p>- Improving
Effective Fetal Monitoring During Labour.</p><p>The Care Bundle is being tested and
piloted by volunteer maternity care providers. NHS England will then consider how
to support implementation nationwide, as part of the Maternity Transformation Programme.</p><p>The
Department has also funded the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit at the University
of Oxford to develop a national standardised Perinatal Mortality Review Tool to support
local perinatal death reviews. This is an important contribution to the efforts to
reduce stillbirths as the tool will ensure systematic, multidisciplinary, high quality
reviews are carried out on the circumstances and care leading up to and surrounding
each stillbirth and neonatal death. It will then enable maternity and neonatal staff
to identify emerging themes across a number of deaths to support learning and changes
in the delivery and commissioning of care, to improve future care and prevent future
deaths which are avoidable.</p>
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