Keir Starmer has laid out more detail of the NHS 10 Year Health Plan. While we welcome long-term plans to bring care back into communities, we need concrete action NOW to ensure access to safe, rights-respecting neighbourhood health services and maternity care.
This includes:
- Personalised care plans for complex needs
- New neighbourhood health services, open 12 hours a day, six days a week, offering tests, post-operation care, nursing and mental health treatment
- Thousands more GPs trained
Birthrights supports the long-term goal of a neighbourhood health service that will bring care back into the community and end the status quo of ‘hospital by default’. And we also welcome the much-needed commitment by the government to tackle inequalities across the NHS.
But it remains critical for women and birthing people to have access to the full spectrum of maternity care – and we want to see concrete commitments from the government to:
- stop closures, restrictions and suspensions to home birth services and birth centres
- continue to protect women and birthing people’s rights to an elective caesarean
- Ensure parity across the country and stop the postcode lottery determining whether birth choices can be met.
- ensure that midwives have the skills to support physiological birth in the community, including skills to support more complex cases such as breech and twin births
Midwives must be empowered to deliver truly person-centred care, and this includes supporting out-of-guidelines care.
Women and birthing people’s rights must be front and centre of their care – this is fundamental to building back trust, addressing entrenched and racial disparities, and delivering rights-respecting care.
We hope that the recently announced National Maternity Investigation will provide more detail and substantive action to create a maternity care plan within the neighbourhood health services that is fit for purpose.
However once again we find ourselves having to reiterate that the time for action is NOW.
We know from our information service that communities are already being deeply impacted by lack of investment in community services; we simply cannot afford to wait until existing infrastructure is decimated.
To address inequalities and injustices, we must embed racial and reproductive justice at the heart of maternity care. That is why we are calling on the government to introduce a SAFE Maternity Care Act to uphold all women and birthing people’s right to choose where, how, and with whom they want to give birth, and to ensure the state meets its obligation to provide safe, respectful, and accessible care for all.