A national assurance assessment of maternity and neonatal care and services in Wales has made a series of findings and recommendations around the role of digital and data, noting in particular the requirement for better real-time data availability and coordination, and further investments in digital and infrastructure.
The assessment was led by an independent chair with support from a panel of seven experts, a multidisciplinary project team from NHS Wales Performance and Improvement and Welsh Government, and a stakeholder panel with an interest in maternity and neonatal services.
The assessment conducted a structured synthesis of more than 500 recommendations from multiple reviews, inspections, investigations, and thematic reports on maternity and neonatal services in Wales. “Structural pressures and the wider conditions in which care is delivered were recognised as the critical constraints, rather than the attitudes of staff,” the government found. “This was also recognised in regard to continuity, compassion, dignity, communication, equity, and women’s involvement in decision-making; staff were seen to value these but there were system-level barriers to their consistent implementation.”
Barriers identified from this analysis covered issues around workforce capacity, wellbeing, and psychological safety; operational and pathway complexity; governance, leadership, and learning; and differences in digital maturity, estates configuration, and service design.
For quality of care and service user outcomes, key findings included variability in data availability across health boards, with all health boards reporting a need for increased national focus, support, and oversight. “Teams were unable to describe an aligned long term digital strategy to enable improvements across Wales,” the panel noted. “They described more specific streams of work to include a Beacon dashboard and implementation of BadgerNet® Maternity individual digital health records across Wales. However, even with such a nationally driven initiative to implement BadgerNet® Maternity, there remained confusion over which modules were being used to drive the necessary change in digital alignment.”
Further findings around quality, safety, and improvement pointed to the use of the BadgerNet® system in helping make real-time data available on safety and quality indicators in neonatal services. In two health board areas, BadgerNet® Maternity has been rolled out for pregnant women, with plans for expansion across the whole of Wales by April 2026. The Beacon maternity and neonatal dashboard has also been introduced to help monitor data on care and outcomes at health board and national level. Monitoring will be required to realise the benefits from improved access to data, according to the panel, as some workstreams identified variation in BadgerNet® Maternity use between health boards.
“A number of national bodies examine different elements of national and Health Board-level datasets, including the Welsh Risk Pool, the National Strategic Clinical Network for Maternity and Neonatal Services, HEIW, HIW and Welsh Government, but there is no formal group that brings together those groups to discuss patterns and outcomes and agree priorities for improvement,” the panel outlines. “This form of intelligence-sharing is not only important for early identification of concerns, it can also identify successful or promising initiatives that can be rolled out nationally. In our assessment we have identified several promising local initiatives, but mechanisms to share and replicate innovation is limited.”
The assessment process highlighted the need for greater access to timely and reliable data on outcomes and experiences, the panel considered, with the data collated for the assessment requiring “extensive” support from data analysts, having not been collated in such a format before, even though “essential” for an overview of maternity and neonatal care. Information from health boards was submitted in inconsistent ways, the panel continued, affecting the ability to compare directly. Also of note were inadequacies in information on the experiences of women and partners to inform work or ongoing monitoring.
“The availability of accurate data is one challenge; access by all people and organisations from relevant sectors is another,” the panel said. “We saw no evidence that staff providing services, or the public, have access timely data on services and outcomes, in contrast with other UK countries.” Recommendations for perinatal care include a national strategic oversight board providing a coordinated mechanism for monitoring and acting upon a range of data. The Beacon dashboard should be prioritised and used to support whole-system understanding, with data made available publicly in reports, the panel goes on, whilst the government should focus on implementing an additional safety signals dashboard like the MOSS68 dashboard recently implemented in England, to enable real-time monitoring of key safety indicators.
Wider trend: Digital transformation in women’s health
NHS England announced the roll-out of an online system designed to identify patterns and trends in data routinely recorded in maternity services and send warning signals when a critical safety check is required late last year. The Maternity Outcomes Signal System (MOSS) is being introduced in response to the “Reading the Signals” report that followed an independent investigation into maternity and neonatal services in East Kent. Upon detecting a pattern or trend in data that indicates something unusual is happening, the MOSS system produces a warning signal, making it mandatory for maternity units to carry out a critical safety check within eight working days. Actions taken in line with these signals are also to be shared with regional and national teams.
The Scottish government has shared how the objectives set out in its Women’s Health Plan for Scotland are to be achieved across two phases. Phase two for 2026 – 2029 prioritises innovation and better data in supporting access to care for women and girls, with the government committing to working collaboratively with partners across academia, industry, and the third sector to identify opportunities to transform care. NHS Scotland Innovation Hubs will support testing and scaling of innovations in three key areas: menopause care, gynaecological care, and data to enable effective innovation.
US-based women’s telehealth company, Midi Health, has reportedly raised $100million in Series D funding, bringing its total valuation to $1billion. New investors include Foresite Capital and Serena Ventures, with Advance Venture Partners, Google Ventures, and Emerson Collective being among those who continued their support. Launched to tackle gaps in women’s healthcare, Midi has now expanded to become a scalable health platform offering insurance coverage to more than 45 million women, the company shares. With in excess of 25,000 patients looking for integrated care each week, it now relies on its proprietary AI engine to help with personalisation, streamlining of operations, and using health data to further research.
