New parents recruited to help improve maternity services

A Derbyshire-wide NHS initiative is reaching out to new and expectant parents to help improve maternity and neonatal services, and even to play a leading role to enact change.

Derbyshire Maternity and Neonatal Voices (DMNV) needs mothers and fathers to share their experiences, knowledge and skills so hospitals can develop services which suit the needs of parents and children.

Members of the public can join DMNV’s Facebook group, and also have the opportunity to join its committee and so work directly on improving services.

DMNV is a collaboration between NHS Derbyshire and Derby Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), University Hospitals Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust and Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

The CCG is responsible for commissioning maternity and neonatal services across Derbyshire, while the two hospitals trusts run the services directly.

Patti Paine, UHDB’s Director of Midwifery, said she was keen to hear from new parents, because they have such immediate experience of the services: “Maternity services are absolutely vital to our community, and improving those services demands that we hear from parents who have experienced them first-hand. We need to understand better what parents have gone through, good and bad, so we can share that knowledge and us to improve.”

“At UHDB we are always trying to improve and develop our maternity and neonatal services, and the input from parents is absolutely priceless in that process. We need to hear from new mums and dads about how we can do better – and what we do well – and the MVP initiative is a really effective way of ensuring that experience has a real impact.”

Alex Albus, programme lead for maternity at NHS Derby and Derbyshire CCG, explained that the DMNV will help all those working in maternity and neonatal care, as well as other services, such as health visitors and mental health practitioners, to understand the experiences of Derbyshire families: "We will be helping women to feed back to the maternity service where they had their baby, and providing a mechanism for NHS services to learn from each other, develop best practice and help reduce inequalities in our area,” she said.

Parents who would like to know more about MVP can attend virtual events in January, and should register their interest for the meetings using the following links:
•    January 19th
•    January 26th

You can also email ddccg.derbyshirematernitytransformation @ nhs.net for more information.