Starting Well In Maternity Services

Public Health Strategy for Maternity Services includes: Breastfeeding; Healthy Weight; Making Every Contact Count; Smoking; Domestic Violence; Alcohol; Well-being; Healthy Weight.

Public Health Strategy for Maternity Services

Public Health Consultant Claire King and Lead Midwife for Public Health at NCUH Denise Lightfoot are working together to oversee the refresh the Public Health Strategy for Maternity Services in WNE Cumbria.

This will support the achievement of maternal public health ambitions within the Better Births plan.

The proposed priorities for the refreshed strategy cover:

• Breastfeeding

• Smoking in pregnancy

• Vaccination in pregnancy

• Healthy Weight before, during and after pregnancy  

• Alcohol consumption during pregnancy

• Domestic Abuse and emotional resilience 

• Safe spacing between pregnancies

• Cross cutting theme – Making Every Contact Count

• Mental well-being

A series of workshops which are open to professionals and service users are looking at each of these priorities in turn. See Events and Opportunities for upcoming dates or Contact us if you want to get involved in this work.​

Progress so far with the Public Health Strategy

Claire King writes: We’ve started holding our priority focus workshops as a way of bringing people together, looking at the data, updating everyone on policy/evidence and also identifying what’s working well and what else we could be doing.

​

Feedback included requests to:

• Extend the maternity strategy to include early years (0-3)

• Ensure partners and family were a focus, as well as women

• Re-write the strategy in a quick easy to read format

• Be action focused

• Develop the plan in order to support the North Cumbria Better Birth’s ‘Improving Prevention’ workstream

The importance of healthy weight before and during pregnancy

​

Did you know that keeping your weight under control during pregnancy protects your baby from developing diabetes later in life?

An information article was recently released in Cumbria Partnership's Trust Talk newsletter.