Recommendation 1

HM Government Rejected

24. The Government is considering this recommendation. 25. The inquiry’s report welcomed the recent investment of £95.6m by NHSEI to target the three overarching themes identified in the first Ockenden Report: workforce numbers, training and development programmes to support culture and leadership, and strengthening board assurance and surveillance to identify issues earlier. A significant proportion of this sum will support the recruitment of 1,200 additional midwives and 100 consultant obstetricians. 26. As the committee notes, the Department has commissioned the RCOG, to develop a new workforce planning tool to improve how maternity units calculate their medical staffing requirements. 27. The tool will calculate the number of obstetricians at all grades required locally and nationally to provide a safe, personalised maternity service within the context of the wider workforce. 28. The Department remains committed to improving maternity safety and will take the recommendations made by the Committee and its Panel in relation to funding for staffing into consideration. As part of this, we will need to consider an assessment of midwifery and obstetric workforce levels. This assessment would also need to take into consideration time for healthcare professionals to partake in annual multi-disciplinary training and provide personalised care. Government response to the HSCC report Recommendation 2 – Obstetric Staffing Recommendation 2 - We further recommend that the Department work with the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists and Health Education England to consider how to deliver an adequate and sustainable level of obstetric training posts to enable trusts to deliver safe obstetric staffing over the years to come. This work should also consider the anaesthetic workforce. Response 29. We accept this recommendation. 30. The Department and Health Education England (HEE) already work closely with system partners to determine the number of training places for a particular specialty, including obstetrics and gynaecology and anaesthetics. 31. An example of this collaboration is HEE’s joint workforce group with the RCOG. The aim of this group is to explore and implement the deliverables for the development of the Obstetrics and Gynaecology (O&G) workforce outlined in HEE’s Maternity Transformation Workforce Strategy. The work is being progressed through five Task and Finish Groups, which are led by the RCOG. These groups are focusing on a range of initiatives including multi-disciplinary working and profiling and modelling of the O&G workforce. 32. We are working with partners to ensure that the number of training posts in O&G and anaesthetics, along with all other medical specialties, is in line with national and regional workforce requirements. We will continue to monitor the effectiveness of current arrangements, including considering the need for an expansion of training places. 33. In addition, as the Committee notes, the Department recently funded the RCOG to develop a tool, which will calculate the number of obstetricians at all grades required locally and nationally to provide a safe, personalised maternity service within the context of the wider workforce. 34. Over the next year, the RCOG will collaborate with and gather data from across the health sector to determine how the tool can help NHS Trusts to understand their own medical staffing needs, and provide standardised, safe and personalised care tailored to their communities. 35. The tool will be freely available to NHS Trusts across the country next year, and will provide maternity staff with a new methodology that calculates the numbers, skill sets and grades of medical staff required within individual maternity units based on local needs. It will help Trusts tackle disparities by taking into account local factors such as birth rates, age of population, the socio- economic status of the area, and geographical factors. Government response to the HSCC report Recommendation 3 – Ringfenced budgets for training in maternity units Recommendation 3 - We recommend that a proportion of maternity budgets should be ringfenced for training in every maternity unit and that NHS Trusts should report this in public through annual Financial and Quality Accounts. It should be for the Maternity Transformation Programme board to establish what proportion that should be; but it must be sufficient to cover not only the provision of training, but the provision of back-fill to ensure that staff are able to both provide and attend training. Response 36. We accept this recommendation in part. 37. In collaboration with national maternity partner organisations, the MTP has led on the development of a Core Competency Framework to address known variation in training and competency assessment and ensure that training to address significant areas of harm is included as minimum core requirements for every maternity and neonatal service. 38. Funding announced at the NHSEI Boa