Overall, local guidance for review of maternity incidents is mostly good or high quality

Published on Tuesday, 24 March 2015 Post

Anjali Shah, Marian Knight and others have published an evaluation of local NHS guidelines on the review of serious maternity incidents. Guidelines covering 70% of all NHS maternity units in the UK were evaluated. Most (55%) were of good or high quality, but patients were rarely involved in guideline development. The majority of guidelines (81%) recommended that a range of health professionals review serious maternity incidents. In over a quarter of guidelines it was unclear whether changes in practice in response to review recommendations were audited or monitored; the authors recommend that such auditing should be mandatory. Read the full paper.