Better Births is the national plan for improving maternity services. It recommends seven key priorities to drive improvement and ensure women and babies receive excellent care wherever they live.

We are working together to implement the recommendations which aim to make maternity services safer, more personalised and family friendly; so that all women and families have access to information to help them make decisions about their care; and to make sure support is centred around their individual needs and circumstances.

To improve maternity services we:

• Are testing different ways of working to provide greater continuity of care for women, their partners and families throughout pregnancy and after giving birth
• Have created a new Community Perinatal Mental Health Service for Norfolk and Waveney which offers targeted help to pregnant women and new mums with serious mental health difficulties
• Have opened a Mother and Baby Unit in Norwich so that mums and their babies can stay together while the mother receives care for conditions such as severe postnatal depression, serious anxiety disorders and postpartum psychosis
• Have employed a specialist midwife to lead on supporting women to stop smoking during pregancy and are running a campaign to help pregnant women access stop smoking services
• Have employed a consultant midwife to share best practice and provide clinical leadership for maternity services across Norfolk and Waveney
• Have developed an online patient portal at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King’s Lynn which provides pregnant women, their partners and families with up-to-date information about maternity services.

You can get involved in shaping what local maternity services are like by joining your local Maternity Voice Partnership. These are groups of women who’ve recently had a baby, their families, midwives, doctors and commissioners of health services who work together to improve care at each of our three hospitals.

Find out more about your local Maternity Voice Partnership: Birth Voices East is based at the James Paget University Hospital Maternity Voices Norwich is based at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital Maternity Voices King’s Lynn and Wisbech is based at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital