Maternity service improvements in the spotlight at recent conference
11 December 2024
Improvements to maternity services within Powys Teaching Health Board (PTHB) were highlighted at the recent Rural Health and Care Wales conference.
Held at the Royal Welsh Showground in Builth Wells last month, the annual conference is aimed at health and care professionals, academics, practitioners, patients and the public with an interest in rural health, well-being and care.
Evie Doman, Clinical Supervisor for Midwives at PTHB and Perinatal Safety Champion for the NHS Wales Executive, attended the conference to present two posters on recent improvement projects in maternity services.
“Being the author of both posters, I was delighted to be chosen to present them at this celebrated conference and connect with like-minded colleagues.
“The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Reflection and Future Direction – achievements in rural health, care and wellbeing over the last 10 years and what lies ahead’ so it was fitting to showcase the work we’ve done in maternity services and the process of how we got there to hopefully inspire others.
“I must thank my colleagues who have supported me with both projects and work to continuously improve the quality and safety of our service for our women and their families. It was a privilege to represent PTHB at the conference”, said Evie.
Evie presented on the following two posters:
- Developing a Maternity Triage System in a Community Setting
This poster shows the work done on the model of maternity triage to reduce variation in midwife response times and standardise pathways for urgent maternity calls. The team aimed to increase midwife response times to answer 95% of urgent maternity calls within 15 minutes.
- Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in a Rural Maternity Setting – Improving Data Quality to Develop Local Services
This poster shows the approach that the team is taking to reduce the percentage of ‘unknown or not stated’ maternity ethnicity data from 54% to 20% by the end of 2024. By having accurate data to understand their population in PTHB, this will allow further service improvement focused on local needs.
Colleagues wishing to speak to Evie for more information on her posters, or spread and scale opportunities, can contact her on Evie.Doman@wales.nhs.uk.