Emergency maternity care in the ambulance service

Did you know we are one of four ambulance trusts to have a consultant midwife? We’re passionate about improving our service for patients who are experiencing a maternity emergency and need our care.

Susie Rhind is a paramedic based in Cumbria. She is currently working as our maternity quality and governance practitioner alongside our Consultant Midwife Stephanie Heys to review our maternity processes. With Susie and Steph’s backgrounds, training and expertise, they are making positive changes to the ways we look after parents and babies.

They have introduced many initiatives in the last couple of years to improve our maternity and newborn care. All of our ambulances now have maternity packs and special equipment which includes a thermal mattress designed to keep babies warm on the journey to hospital. We have also introduced snugglepods. These are soft, knitted pockets to provide dignity for babies who have been born too early for resuscitation, something that is a comfort for a family when travelling to hospital.

A new maternity care policy was introduced for our clinicians, which clarifies what care is expected when caring for women and newborns. Susie has also introduced a protocol for staff who handle 999 calls. The protocol ensures all maternity calls are flagged to a senior clinician. The senior clinician will provide additional support and guidance to ambulance clinicians if needed to provide the safest care to our patients.

Susie has written a blog about her career, her training and how she has helped to develop our maternity care over the years, you can read a snippet of it here:

“The birth of my daughter changed my whole perspective around the care that I provided clinically and how I viewed the world. Her shoulder became stuck during birth, and her arm sustained multiple fractures to facilitate her birth. The first time I looked at my long-awaited child, she lay lifeless in my arms.

“The team quickly whisked her away to another part of the hospital to attempt resuscitation whilst my husband and I were swallowed in the silence. I promised myself, that I would do all I could to support new parents in a similar position.

“She was eventually returned to me, bruised but alive and peering at me quizzically through a woollen jaunty hat. This moment was the beginning of my realisation that If I had been an ambulance clinician in that situation, dealing with that case then I would have faced a myriad of uncertainty and apprehension. It was at this point that I began to focus my own continuous professional development on maternity and newborn care. My son was born almost two years later and came into the world with a little less fanfare – making up for that point since!”

You can read Susie’s blog on how our maternity care practice has evolved at: https://www.nwas.nhs. uk/news/maternity-blog