Rebecca Taylor-Onion and Alison Brennan provide a summary below of the key action points in relation to improving maternity and neonatal care in NHS England's recently published Medium Term Planning Framework – delivering change together 2026/27 to 2028/29 and the likely challenges for NHS trusts.
NHS England's Medium Term Planning Framework is aligned to the 10 Year Health Plan and is an ambitious plan which sets out priorities and expectations to achieve sustainable improvement across health services in England.
Improving the quality of maternity and neonatal services is a core commitment in the 10 Year plan and the Medium Term Planning Framework includes key actions to improve care and ensure women and families are listened to. These are:
- employing best practice resources as they are launched, such as the national roll-out of the Avoiding Brain Injury in Childbirth (ABC) programme and the Sands National Bereavement Care Pathway for stillbirth and neonatal death.
- using the national Maternity and Neonatal Inequalities Data Dashboard to identify variation in practice and intervening to achieve improvement.
- implementing the Maternity Outcomes Signal System (MOSS) across all NHS trusts by November 2025 to use near real-time data to monitor local key safety indicators such as rates of stillbirth, neonatal death and infant brain injury.
NHS England says, “near real-time data, the maternity and neonatal performance dashboard and the new inequalities dashboard…alongside gathering patient experience information and active staff engagement, will give [clinical] teams, leadership and boards vital insight into the quality of their [maternity and neonatal] services.”
Where there are incidents, the Medium Term Planning Framework states the NHS should engage proactively with families, be honest and open and seek to implement changes swiftly to prevent recurrence.
ICBs will also be required to take steps to improve the quality of care before the independent investigation into maternity and neonatal care, led by Baroness Amos, finalises its action plan and publishes its initial findings (which were expected in December 2025 but have now been delayed to next year).
According to NHS England, the Medium Term Planning Framework “marks the return of locally-led ambition” in the NHS and shows how “[the] reform agenda will drive faster delivery of care now while creating a platform for sustained improvement in the future”, supporting delivery of the government’s 10 Year Health Plan for the NHS in England.
NHS trusts will therefore be expected to take responsibility for identifying and instituting local reforms quickly. However, it is likely to be challenging for trusts to achieve significant transformational change whilst continuing to meet high demand for routine healthcare services.
For more information on the NHS Medium Term Planning Framework, please contact our expert health and care experts.
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