NHS Listening Exercise. Deadline in 3 days and we NEED your help!

Babyzoid in Neonatal Intensive Care

I have an urgent favour to ask of my readers and Mummy blogger friends. The Government led NHS Listening Exercise is closing on Monday and we need as many people as possible to fill in this short survey outlining how the NHS can protect neonatal services

The Future of the NHS Form

The key points are as follows - please feel free to copy and paste these, though please personalise if you are able.

“Choice and Competition”

· Competition and choice is not an appropriate driver of service improvement within the context of neonatal care
· Collaboration across the different NHS organisations providing neonatal services, rather than competition between them, is vital to the provision of high quality services for premature and sick babies
· Neonatal networks are essential to ensuring this cooperation between the various providers of neonatal care across a region

“Advice and Leadership”

· Welcome the responsibility of the NHS Commissioning board for commissioning all three levels of neonatal care
· The excellent work of neonatal networks, the bodies which currently coordinate care for premature and sick babies, must continue. Structures and funding need to be put in place to support these networks in a reformed NHS
· Situations where mothers and their premature or sick babies were transferred hundreds of miles away from home are mostly a thing of the past, this may reverse if the networks are dismantled.

“Education and Training”

It is crucial that training for neonatal nurses is available and that all neonatal units in England meet the minimum standards set out in the Toolkit for High Quality Neonatal Services
· That one-to-one nursing is available for babies in intensive care
· that 70% (special care) and 80% (high dependency care) of the workforce should hold a current Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) registration and that 70% should hold an accredited post-registration qualification in specialised neonatal care.

We need the government to understand that there can be no short cuts when it comes to premature and sick babies.

Please let me know via Twitter, email or in the comments section if you have filled in the survey. Thankyou so much :)