Year 8 of NHS Resolution’s Maternity Incentive Scheme launched

NHS Resolution recently launched year 8 of its Maternity Incentive Scheme (MIS), which will run from April 2026 to March 2027. MIS is a financial incentive program for trusts that provide maternity services, designed to enhance maternity and neonatal safety within trusts and improve experiences for women, babies and families. It refunds the MIS payment made to NHS Resolution for trusts that can demonstrate they have implemented and met a set of core safety actions to improve the quality and safety of care.

Year 8 of MIS has been refined on the basis of the findings of NHS Resolution’s recently publication evaluation report on years 1 to 6 of the MIS. A streamlined set of six core safety actions has been introduced to reduce the administrative burden and enable trusts to focus on outcomes, with an emphasis on equity, local flexibility and board accountability. The safety actions are:

• workforce and capacity
• training
• learning from reviews and investigations
• service-user voice and equity
• care bundles
• board oversight, governance, culture and leadership

Trusts will need to demonstrate they have effective systems in place to support safe, high-quality maternity and neonatal care. This will include triangulating evidence and board assurance for each safety action, for instance, evidence that training changes practice, are any variances understood and that there is demonstrable improvement. 

These safety actions align with the Dash review of patient safety across the health and care landscape, published last year, and the recently published Interim Report of the Independent Investigation into Maternity and Neonatal Services In England.

NHS Resolution says year 8 of MIS will be a key transitional year as the scheme will need to adapt to the recommendations of the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation (due to be published in June 2026) and the associated action plan that will be developed by the government’s National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce.

The Taskforce’s action plan is likely to require trusts to show they have taken further significant steps to ensure they are providing safe maternity and neonatal care, including working more collaboratively, strengthening service-user voice and equity and focusing on outcomes and continuous improvement.

The refinement of MIS in year 8 reflects NHS Resolution’s continued aim of translating recommendations into actionable steps for improved safety NHS Resolution says that “preventing avoidable harm in maternity and neonatal care is both the right thing to do for families and helps reduce long-term clinical negligence costs” and that it “remains committed to transparent evaluation and continuous improvement of all our maternity and neonatal safety initiatives.”

It is early days for the year 8 of the MIS but there is a clear shift in strengthening the focus on outcomes, equity and board accountability and a positive move in translating the required safety actions and improvement into frontline change.