All women deserve access to a safe birth. All women, however, also deserve a positive and empowering birth experience and to be autonomous in their decision making. Research is demonstrating that if women are not allowed to make their own choices around their pregnancy and birth, rather than comply with strict policies and guidelines, they will find another way to make autonomous decisions with or without our support.
Women are increasingly giving birth out of the mainstream system. Why is this and what can we do about it?

There are considerable tensions for healthcare staff between their employee allegiance and contracts, patient safety, and their responsibilities to codes of conduct within professional registration, and the NHS Constitution.

The research aim was to identify how power and hierarchy influence staff safety in maternity services, and this was achieved by reviewing research papers concerned with personal narratives of staff experiences and perspectives of employment in their profession.

Surgical swabs are routinely used by obstetricians and midwives during caesarean sections or perineal repairs following a vaginal birth. On rare occasions, a surgical swab can be left behind by mistake. When this happens, the incident is declared a ‘never event’. After a brief overview of retained swabs never events incidents in maternity, Francesca Spranzi will share her journey – with its successes and its failures - into developing a modified surgical swab prototype that aims to reduce the risk of never events linked to retained swabs. An open and unique insight into the challenges to promote innovation within healthcare.

Professional guidelines recommend midwives and obstetricians actively involve women and birthing people in making decisions about their care. To date, breech research has focused mainly on assessing the effectiveness of different management options, but little attention has been given to women's feelings regarding breech presentation and management. This presentation will discuss the findings from a primary research undertaken by the author, which explores women’s experience of breech presentation and their perception of choice and support in making decisions with regards to breech management. In doing so, the author will provide an introduction, aims of the study and an overview of the research methods used for data analysis. The results from this research will be discussed within the context of women and birthing people's rights in the UK.

Ros Bragg talks about the impact of maternity discrimination on women and their families, and why demand for Maternity Action’s services has never been higher.

The aim of all of maternity care is prediction prevention of adverse pregnancy outcomes and helping birthing parents with accurate information to allow them to make choices for managing their pregnancy. This can only be ensured by an effective collaboration between doctors and midwives, who can work together to offer the best care that is possible. We are unique in the UK that birthing parents and families receive support and clinical care from both midwives and doctors rather than just one of these professionals. We are also unique in that we actually have a national strategy for prevention of stillbirths. There is however, much scope for better multidisciplinary working and better models to prevent adverse outcomes such as stillbirth. This talk on prediction and prevention of adverse outcomes discusses about common pregnancy complications that can be effectively predicted and at times prevented with modern evidence-based care through effective multidisciplinary working.

Back in 2001, on her first visit to Darfur, Patricia Parker OBE, Founder and CEO of Kids for Kids, remembers seeing the fear in the eyes of the young girls there.

“The young girls were absolutely terrified of childbirth. With no healthcare in the village, young mothers had to rely on a traditional birth attender – an older lady, totally untrained in health care, who had survived childbirth. FGM is a common practise in Darfur. Obstructed labour is therefore not unusual. Without training, they would not know that the only hope would be to get the mother to hospital. Their only recourse was rope delivery. The vision of that is terrible. The mother is lucky to survive, but the baby almost invariably dies. If they do go to hospital in the late states of labour they go on the back of a donkey, or on a stretcher between two donkeys – can you imagine?! It was clear that something had to be done!”

We have fascinating, emerging evidence highlighting links between maternal gut microbiome in pregnancy, mode of birth and infant feeding with improved maternal and child health outcomes. In a time where conditions such as obesity, asthma, allergies, and eczema are all on the rise, gut health may form an important consideration for expectant mothers and their children.

Telehealth has gained more attention in the last 2 years than it did for over a decade. The COVID pandemic highlighted the flexibility, accessibility, and adoptability of telehealth within the health service delivery industry. Maternity services innovated overnight to support couples going through pregnancy and childbirth during the pandemic. This session will highlight the ways in which maternity services have and can be integrated into service delivery, the short- and long-term outcomes to watch for, and potential challenges.

Surgical Site Infection Post C-Section can be physically and psychologically challenging for new mothers- This session focuses on the principles and prevention of surgical site infection, including a recent update supporting the NICE Medical Technologies Guidance for use within the NHS in England published in Feb 2021 on Leukomed Sorbact. A personal patient experience will be presented which inspired the development of a post-caesarean wound care pathway resulting in positive patient outcomes.