Maternity and Neonatal Services - an important statement following our Board meeting on Thursday, 27th March 2025

An important statement following our Board meeting on Thursday, 27th March 2025:

At our Board meeting on Thursday, we received two important updates relating to the improvement programme we are progressing in relation to our maternity and neonatal services. These reports are available on our website and relate to the progress being made by the Independent Review and the internal Gold Command arrangements we have in place to oversee improvements. Go here to read the Independent Review report and go here to read the Gold Command report.

I would like to acknowledge that not every woman and their family receive the quality of care we aspire to and on behalf of the Board, I’d like to apologise to women and their families whose experience of our maternity services was not as good as it should have been.

We know that of the 3,000+ births we see each year, many of the women we support through childbirth have a positive experience. In February our friends and family survey responses relating to our obstetric services indicated that 91.8% said their experience was good or very good (97 surveys were completed).

But this is not the case for everyone. We know from our review of concerns and other feedback from women and their families that we have more to do to ensure good communication with women – particularly in relation to the timeliness of clinical assessments and interventions and keeping women informed about progress throughout their care pathway.

We know that childbirth is not risk free – our commitment is to ensure that our services are as safe as they can be every day, on every shift.  It must be acknowledged that we cannot eliminate all risk. We know that things can change very rapidly. As a regional centre with a level 3 neonatal service women are transferred to us if they require the specialist services we provide. This includes women transferring to us from across the South-West Wales region in both planned and emergency situations. The Neonatal Network will facilitate the transfer of an expectant mum to us from further afield if the baby (or babies) is expected to need neonatal care and there are no cots available in their local centre.

Every day our clinical teams assess the levels of acuity of the expectant mums in their care and make decisions about clinical priorities in light of changing demand – balancing planned and emergency needs – aiming to ensure that every woman and baby gets the support and care they need. We have a dashboard of operational and service quality information and combine this with the conversations we have with women and their families to enable us to assess and manage clinical safety and people’s experience effectively and with compassion.

We know that on rare occasions, harm occurs and sadly, in a very small number of cases, the outcome is not what any of us would want. We have more to do in relation to supporting women and families when harm occurs, supporting our staff to identify when harm has occurred, supporting women and families through this difficult time, and ensuring the right processes are followed and that any learning is identified and fed back into clinical practice. We are also strengthening how we support our staff as unexpected outcomes also have a profound impact on them too.

We are on a journey to improve our services, and we are making good progress – living our values is very important – caring for each other, working together and always improving. We know we have more to do, and I am grateful for the feedback we get from women and their families – it is not always easy to hear, but it is important that we listen to what people are telling us and use this to continue to improve our services. We are expecting a Llais report shortly, and we know that this will provide us with another source of feedback from women and their families.

I would like to thank our teams in our Maternity and Neonatal services for their commitment to providing the best services we can to our mums and their babies, and their families, and to continuing to improve our services.

Once again, on behalf of the Board, I would like to apologise to women and their families where their experience has not been as good as it should have been.

Abigail Harris,

Chief Executive, Swansea Bay UHB