Maternity and the early years

The National Service Framework for Children, Young People and Maternity Services, published in 2004, is a 10 year programme developed with extensive engagement from healthcare practitioners, parents, children and young people. It put in place national standards for the first time for children’s health and social care and remains the most comprehensive policy guidance that underpins focused improvements in children and young people’s health and wellbeing.

The policy Maternity Matters was launched in April 2007. The policy contains a series of national guarantees on choice within maternity services. All NHS organisations will have to implement these guarantees by 2009. These are significant changes for the service. There is an urgent need for workforce planning principles to be applied to maternity services so that changes can be made in preparation for the implementation of Maternity Matters. These changes cannot happen without carefully planned workforce development within organisations to ensure that units have the capacity and the skills to deliver services designed around the needs of mothers.

Skills for Health - Workforce Projects Team (WPT) was commissioned by the Department of Health to develop a workforce planning resource pack and an e-learning CD to assist in planning the workforce to meet the challenges of the new policy. This development also included a series of workshops aimed at a mixed audience involved in the delivery of maternity services which included clinicians, heads of midwifery and service management staff as well as human resources and workforce planning representatives.

As a result of these workshops a need for the development of a business case template and user guidance was identified. WPT worked in consultation with a range of maternity service leads to produce this as a downloadable resource, available below.

Maternity Matters e-learning resource A step by step e-learning guide to workforce planning for maternity services.	Maternity Services Workforce Development Resource Pack Part of a range of resources developed to support maternity services.
Maternity events Skills for Health - Workforce Projects Team delivered a series of workforce planning capability workshops to further support Maternity Matters.	New Resource Planning your future maternity services, a business case template.

Workforce planning
Effective workforce planning ensures you will have a workforce of the right size, with the right skills, organised in the right way within the budget that you can afford, delivering services to provide the best possible care.

Workforce plans are prepared at many levels. At a local level for example, there are plans (staffing rotas) prepared once a month by a ward manager to ensure their ward has all its shifts covered by staff with the correct skills and competences to guarantee that patient services are delivered safely and effectively.

If you would like to comment on this section, or if there is something you feel should be within this section, please contact us by emailing workforceprojectsteam@skillsforhealth.org.uk.