Look who’s talking

Maternity care is one of the most fundamental components of any healthcare system. It shapes not only the health of mothers and babies, but the long-term well-being of families and communities. Yet maternity services in the UK remain under intense scrutiny.

Recent investigations have highlighted unacceptable failures in care and persistent inequalities. Too many opportunities to prevent harm have been missed.

While most women receive excellent care from dedicated NHS professionals, too many families continue to experience outcomes that fall short of what should be expected from a modern healthcare system.

Confidence in maternity services depends on the NHS showing it can learn, adapt and improve.

The UK ranks 19th out of 22 comparable countries for infant and newborn mortality, while maternal mortality is at its highest level in almost two decades. Behind these figures lie deep inequalities, with outcomes differing significantly across communities and population groups.

This is particularly striking given the UK’s position at the forefront of life sciences and HealthTech innovation. We have world-class expertise, data and technology at our disposal. The challenge is turning those strengths into better outcomes for women and babies.

Yet there are reasons to be optimistic. Perinatal mortality has fallen significantly over the past decade. That matters because it shows that change is possible when we focus on what works and put evidence into practice.

However, progress has not been consistent enough. Too many women and babies are still not receiving the standard of care we know can be delivered.

The problem is not that we lack innovation. In many cases, the technologies, diagnostics and digital tools that could make a difference already exist. What we have struggled with is getting those solutions into everyday care, making them work alongside existing services and scaling them consistently across the NHS.
The important distinction is that this is not simply a story about technology.

Anyone working in maternity care knows that many of the biggest pressures have little to do with technology. Rising demand, increasingly complex pregnancies and expectations for more personalised care are placing growing strain on already stretched services.

Midwives, obstetricians and maternity support workers are carrying enormous responsibility in challenging circumstances. No piece of technology is going to solve that on its own. It cannot replace clinical expertise, good leadership or a strong workplace culture.

But it can help make better use of the time and expertise we already have. That, in my view, is where the conversation about HealthTech needs to change. The most important question is simple: can this make it easier for healthcare professionals to deliver good care?

Administration is an excellent example. For many healthcare professionals, too much time is still spent documenting, searching for information and carrying out routine tasks that could be made simpler.

Digital tools that improve information sharing, streamline documentation and automate parts of these processes will not remove the need for clinicians. They can, however, give them something that is increasingly scarce: time.

More time with a patient, more time to listen, more time to make a clinical decision. And crucially, more time to spot when something isn’t right.

That becomes particularly important as the NHS moves towards providing more care closer to home. Community-based maternity care can offer women greater choice and convenience, but it also means clinicians need to stay connected with women across wider geographical areas and throughout more complex care pathways.

If the infrastructure is not there, the ambition to move care closer to home simply creates more work for already stretched teams. This is where technology can make a practical difference.

Remote monitoring, digital communication tools and home testing can help women receive care closer to home while ensuring clinicians retain oversight and access to timely information.

None of these things should be introduced because they are new or because they sound innovative, they should be introduced when they solve a real problem. That is the opportunity highlighted in recommendation two of ABHI’s Delivering Gold Standard Maternity Care with HealthTech, which calls for greater use of technologies that support personalised and community-based care.

There is another area where innovation could have an important role: identifying risk earlier. Maternity investigations repeatedly highlight cases where deterioration was not recognised quickly enough, monitoring was inconsistent or concerns were not escalated.

Technology will never remove those risks completely, but better information can help clinicians see what is happening sooner and act earlier. We are already seeing this potential in areas such as remote monitoring, advanced diagnostics and genomics.

These technologies give us an opportunity to move towards a more proactive approach to care, identifying and managing risks before they become more serious problems.

Gestational diabetes is a good example. It affects between 10% and 20% of pregnant women and can increase the risk of complications for both mother and baby. Our recent report highlights evidence that current approaches may miss a significant proportion of cases, alongside the potential for continuous glucose monitoring to support earlier intervention and better self-management.

The benefit here is not simply a better clinical outcome. It can also mean a more convenient experience for women, with greater understanding and control over their own care.

Innovation also has something important to contribute to one of the most stubborn issues in maternity services: variation. Where a woman lives should not determine the quality of care she receives.

Yet we know that there are significant differences in outcomes and experiences between communities and population groups. Technology is not automatically the answer to that problem. In fact, if new solutions are only adopted in certain parts of the NHS, there is a risk that innovation could make existing inequalities worse.

However, when evidence-based technologies are adopted consistently and implemented well, they can help reduce unwarranted variation, improve access to specialist expertise and support more consistent care.

That is where innovation becomes about more than efficiency. It becomes a question of equity.

Of course, getting there is not as simple as buying the technology. One of the biggest barriers to progress is adoption. We have seen promising technologies introduced into the NHS only to struggle to become part of routine care.

Sometimes the technology itself is not the problem. It is the implementation, the integration with existing systems, the training, the procurement process or simply a lack of capacity to make the change happen.

This is why collaboration matters. Industry, clinicians, policymakers, patients, academia and the NHS all have a role to play. The people developing new solutions need to understand the reality of delivering care, while healthcare teams need the support and freedom to adopt approaches that genuinely address the problems they face.

Stronger collaboration between industry, the NHS, Government and academia is therefore rightly one of the key recommendations in ABHI’s report.

Ultimately, I don’t think the question is whether innovation has a place in maternity care. It clearly does. The question is whether we are making the most of the innovation we already have.

The NHS cannot simply recruit its way out of rising demand. We need to think differently about how we use the workforce, the expertise and the resources already available to us.

Technology can be part of that answer, not by replacing people, but by helping them work differently and giving them more capacity to focus on care.

That could mean a midwife spending less time on administration. A woman being monitored safely at home rather than travelling to hospital. A clinician having better information to identify a developing risk. A patient getting access to the same high standard of care regardless of where she lives.

Those are not abstract benefits of digital transformation. They are tangible improvements to the way maternity care is delivered.

If we are serious about improving outcomes for women and babies, we need to stop thinking of innovation as something that sits alongside the NHS. It needs to become part of how the NHS delivers care.

That means investing not just in new technology, but in the people, leadership, infrastructure and implementation needed to make it work.

The prize is not a more technologically advanced maternity service for its own sake. It is a service where clinicians have more time to care, risks are identified earlier, women have greater choice and control, and high-quality care is available more consistently.

That is what good innovation should ultimately deliver. Not technology for technology’s sake, but a better experience and better outcomes for the women, babies and families who rely on maternity services.

Charlotte Hart is Communications and Events Executive at ABHI