World Patient Safety Day 2024 – Reducing Preterm Birth Rate

Rachael Garrett, Programme Manager for Maternity and Neonatal at Health Innovation KSS, reflects on this year’s World Patient Safety Day theme, “Improving diagnosis for patient safety”, and discusses how the Patient Safety Collaborative’s work in Maternity and Neonatal services is helping improve health outcomes.

World Patient Safety Day calls for global solidarity and concerted action by all countries and international partners to improve patient safety. This year’s theme “Improving diagnosis for patient safety” highlights the critical importance of correct and timely diagnosis in ensuring patient safety and improving health outcomes.

As a Patient Safety Collaborative, we play an important role in delivering the National Patient Safety Improvement Programme, which aims to support systems to test and spread effective safety interventions and strategies, learn from excellence and continuously improve.

Maternity and Neonatal Safety Improvement Programme (MatNeoSIP)

MatNeoSIP is one of the programmes we deliver as part of the national Patient Safety Collaborative and one of the programme’s key aims is to support maternity and neonatal professionals to improve the optimisation and stabilisation of pre-term infants and in the early recognition and management deterioration in women and babies.

Reducing Preterm Birth Rate at ASPH: a success story

We are very proud that, alongside Ashford and St. Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, we have been shortlisted for the Patient Safety Award at the HSJ Awards 2024 for our project “Reducing Preterm Birth: a success story”.

The Maternity Safety Ambition aims to halve the rate of stillbirths, neonatal deaths, and brain injuries occurring during or soon after birth by 2025. A national target has been set to reduce preterm births from 8% to 6%. Specialist Preterm Birth (PTB) Clinics and services are essential to reaching this goal.

Ashford and St Peter’s Hospital (ASPH) established a specialist PTB clinic in 2018 and has significantly reduced their PTB rate, now among the lowest in the country. Their services have expanded to optimise preterm deliveries, improve outcomes, and provide follow-up care, encouraging couples to return to our services for future pregnancies. As part of this the team have implemented a robust triaging pathway to identify women with PTB risk factors at their booking appointments so preventative measures and preparation can be done as early as possible.

We are working with the team to ensure the innovative work is shared regionally and nationally to help reduce variation and support a standardised approach to care. Our ambition is to establish a cross system preterm optimisation guideline that supports safe and appropriate transfer to ensure preterm babies are born in the right place with the appropriate level of neonatal care.

If you want to find out more about our work, please get in touch.