Maternity & Neonatal Voices Partnership

We enable Integrated Care Boards and NHS Trusts to meet the ambitions of the NHS England guidance on Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnerships.

MNVPs ensure that service users’ voices are at the heart of decision-making in maternity and neonatal services by being embedded within the leadership of NHS provider trusts and feeding into the Local Maternity and Neonatal System.

Since 2020, we have hosted MNVPs in Greater Manchester – one of the largest Maternity and Neonatal Systems in the country.

We deliver eight MNVPs across Greater Manchester, which includes recruiting, training and supporting an MNVP Lead for each hospital in effective advocacy and engagement with their maternity and neonatal teams.

Through our engagement and project management team, we organise events, surveys, talks and training, newsletters and social media activity.

Additionally, we are developing a training programme for MNVPs which we will be rolling out UK-wide.

External MNVP hosting inline with NHS England guidance

  • Safeguarding
  • GDPR
  • Training
  • Wellbeing
  • HR
  • Finance
  • Volunteer management

Our Projects

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Fifteen Steps for Maternity

Fifteen Steps for Maternity is an event at which service users come together to walk round clinical areas making notes on each area e.g. Birth Centre, Antenatal clinic, but specifically in terms of how it makes them feel from the perspective of a service user. Heads of Midwifery, their maternity teams and service users then come back together to discuss and agree changes and actions. We are in the process of writing a “How to guide” for our MNVP Leads to use when organising Fifteen Steps. Additionally we are contributing to work NHS England are doing to update the Fifteen Steps toolkit to cover maternity and neonatal.

Rethinking Preterm Birth information

Research suggests that Black and Asian women face a raised chance of preterm birth. Typically advice around signs and and symptoms of preterm birth has tended to be couched in medical terms – and information for service users not easily digestible.

We partnered with the Women’s CHAI Project – a VCSE organisation in Greater Manchester. The charity works with women in the borough and beyond, particularly those from South Asian backgrounds, asylum seekers and refugees. Through holding multiple co-production sessions with groups in Oldham and in Old Trafford, accessible and relevant terms, expressions and images were developed by the groups.

We then worked with health professionals and a graphic designer to create a leaflet featuring accessible language and diagrams to explain symptoms and when to seek help. This was taken back to the groups for further refinement before finalisation. This new resource will be made available to midwives, healthcare professionals and families across the North West of England

Induction of Labour co-production project

Increasing rates of induction and related complaints makes the induction of labour pathway a key opportunity for quality improvement work. We set about engaging service users and staff, using a variety of methods, on their current experiences of receiving and delivering care.

Service user engagement includes an online survey, an online workshop and six face-to-face workshops targeting deaf service users, Muslim and ethnically diverse communities. Staff engagement included on-site ad hoc three question structured interviews and development of a community of practice. Next steps are to bring service users and staff together to agree on three or four coproduction projects that will tackle the problems our engagement has highlighted.