A LANDMARK project designed to address stark disparities in maternal health outcomes for Black women has been launched.  

The NHS Race and Health Observatory, in partnership with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and supported by the Health Foundation, has established an innovative 15-month, peer-to-peer Learning and Action network to address the gaps seen in severe maternal morbidity, perinatal mortality, and neonatal morbidity between women of different ethnic groups.

Data consistently show alarmingly higher rates of maternal and baby deaths amongst Black and Asian women compared to their White counterparts.  

Professor Habib Naqvi, chief executive, NHS Race and Health Observatory, said: “It’s clear that long-standing racial disparities in maternal and neonatal health outcomes require urgent action. The mission of the Observatory is not just to highlight the scale of disparities, but to also provide practical, evidence-based solutions to those challenges.

“That’s why we’ll be working alongside healthcare providers, from across the country, to make practical progress in addressing these inequalities in a sustained and meaningful way.” 

Across England, nine NHS Trusts and Integrated Care Systems will participate.

In the UK, Black British mothers are up to four times more likely than white mothers to die during pregnancy or within the first six weeks after childbirth.

The risk of dying from pregnancy-related causes is three times higher for mothers of mixed ethnicity than for White mothers and twice as high for women of Asian ethnicity.

Pedro Delgado, vice president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, said: “The aspiration is to accelerate the pace of improvement, partner closely with mothers and families, foster collaboration across the system and use the intensive learning with these teams to inform approaches to scale up and spread impactful changes over time that will reduce harm, suffering, and improve outcomes”.

Risks

As part of the Learning and Action Network, each team will outline their objectives, key measures, and targets to reduce and manage risks.

Priority areas are haemorrhage, preterm birth, post-partum depression and gestational diabetes.

Tailored action plans will be developed with each team to explore measures to tackle these, with findings factoring an embedded equity lens.

Longer term, the programme will see the development of new equitable policy recommendations for maternity providers and build a repository of best practice for potential replication across the country.

The programme will be supported by an advisory group made up of experts in midwifery, maternal and neonatal medicine, and nursing and will run until June 2025. 

Dr Malte Gerhold, Director of Innovation and Improvement at the Health Foundation, said: “Successful quality improvement in health care relies not just on the use of robust methodologies, but on bringing together staff across boundaries, building relationships, and developing new solutions together, including with patients. And critical in this joint effort is making sure that it improves care for everyone, particularly those receiving poorer outcomes, access, or quality.

“We hope that through these new action and learning networks the RHO and IHI can
demonstrate a way to achieve this, and help make equity a central component of all future improvement activity in the NHS.”