£1.5 million to make pregnancies safer

The second round of the Innovating for Improvement programme will be supporting the NHS Borders team and twenty other health care projects in the UK.

The scheme’s aim is to improve health care delivery a well as the way people manage their own health care by testing and developing innovative ideas and approaches and putting them into practice.

The initiative from NHS Borders is aiming to develop SAFER, a safe assessment form to evaluate ante-natal risks at as early a stage as possible in pregnancy, making the care NHS Borders provide even safer for expecting mothers.

The team will be led by Dr Brian Magowan, Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist for NHS Borders.

He said this week: “SAFER is a risk assessment tool that is used to assess antenatal risks and develop comprehensive clinical management plans. This project will involve testing this methodology and engaging pregnant women in its development and implementation, with the aim of creating a community-based model that will improve maternal outcomes.

“Over the course of the programme the team will develop its innovative idea, put it into practice and gather evidence about how the innovation improves the quality of health care.”

Gill Lunn, Maternity Patient Safety Champion for NHS Borders said: “Pregnant women want to have a healthy baby and we want to make the process as safe as possible. We aim to introduce the SAFER tool with every expecting mother at their booking clinic at 8 – 10 weeks pregnant. This will help provide the safest possible outcomes for both mother and child.

Gill Clayton, Programme Manager from the Health Foundation added: “We are very excited to be working with such high-calibre teams, who all have great innovative ideas.

“As an organisation we are keen to support innovation at the frontline, therefore I am pleased that we will be able to support these ambitious teams to develop and test their ideas over the next year.”

He continued: “Our aim is to promote the effectiveness and real impact of the teams’ innovations and show how they have succeeded in improving the quality of health care, with the intention of these being widely adopted across the UK health service.”

The programme will run for fifteen months and each project will receive up to £75,000 of funding to support the implementation and evaluation of the project.