Senior Leadership Foreword

Welcome to the “Women’s Health and Newborn Annual Report” 2019-2020, and thank you to all those who have contributed. Not only to the published word, but for everything you all do every day caring for our community.

With COVID-19 being the focus of significant work over the last year, we would like to take the opportunity to thank the division for stepping up to the mark as we fluctuated between the various levels of lock down and for supporting each other and displaying the DHB values along that journey. This pandemic forced us to think differently about the way we deliver care, the need to look after one another and the important role our community plays in our care partnership. It also gave us the motivation to challenge our current ways of working and we see this reflected in some of the innovation described in this report.

As you will read, the report reflects this dedicated work in an ever increasing and demanding clinical workload whilst constantly seeking new initiatives across the breadth of care for women of all ages and their newborn.

This year the report is filled with pictures and real life stories from our community and we would like to acknowledge how Women’s Health is leading the way with community engagement for CM Health. You will sense the growing involvement of women as consumers of our services as they become part of all aspects of planning and service delivery. We welcome this partnership and are strongly focussed on a deeper understanding of the needs of our culturally diverse community and acknowledge our commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi as the founding document of Aotearoa New Zealand.

It is also exciting to see the progression of joined up care between primary and secondary services for gynaecology, demonstrated by new primary care initiatives to improve access to care for women. With resource constraints and theatre access limited, maximising care in the community is paramount. The Maternity Quality and Safety Programme (MQSP) plays an important role in raising the profile of the quality and safety of maternity services that women and whaanau receive to ensure, as far as possible, all babies get a great start to life. Our chapter on MQSP provides updates on current projects, the work completed by local multidisciplinary teams to identify and implement improvements to local maternity services, driven by local midwifery and medical leaders working with maternity consumers to improve the outcomes for women and their whaanau.

The report also provides us with an opportunity to publish some of our outcomes and also enables us to bench mark ourselves against other DHBs using the standard primip (a low risk, first time mother at term) by way of the clinical indicators. As only a third of our first time mothers are standard primips the information is depicted over the last few years for comparison and also presented by ethnicity.

We continue to be a strong, motivated team working passionately to deliver care within an environment of increasing demand and complexity. As reflected throughout the report, our Women’s Health strategy is to support the provision of quality care which is woman centred, safe and equitable for all mothers, babies and whanau.

Thank you all for your wonderful level of commitment to our mission during this challenging year.

MARY BURR

General Manager DR SARAH TOUT

Clinical Director CHRIS MALLON

Chief Midwife