Hello, my name is Lucy
I think it is a strong reason why the NHS at 75 is celebrating innovation. Despite the adversity facing the entirety of health and care, we continue to make innovations which transform people’s lives. This is the balancing force on the scales against the challenges that weigh us down. That innovation comes from the collective minds of us all, sharing our insights and our experiences, with the overriding impetus to do better. When we broaden this from our own organisations to bring people together from across organisations in the NHS, from social care, from the voluntary and community sector, from academia, from research and industry, we see this flourish. Our collective experience of the pandemic only demonstrates how we can innovate and thrive amidst the most challenging and destabilising of times. As 
Here in West Yorkshire, we see innovation in action working across our organisations like the Our blog this week is from Sonya Ainley, Project Manager, and Vicky Caunt, Communications and Engagement Manager for the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Local Maternity and Neonatal System.
Hello, we’re Sonya and Vicky, and we’re keen to share news of a regional campaign we’re developing with the LMNS to ensure more pregnant women book antenatal appointments by 10 weeks of pregnancy.
Following an equity and equality analysis, our Trusts have been challenged with increasing the rates of women being seen by a midwife earlier in their pregnancy journey. Current NICE guidance is that women should be offered a first antenatal appointment with a midwife within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. Seeing a midwife early helps ensure a more personalised approach. It also means that midwives can share important information for a healthy pregnancy, for example about folic acid supplements, woman accessing screening or stopping smoking. Crucially, it means that anyone with specific needs or risk factors can be identified early, so that appropriate care can be provided from the beginning.
We are very proud that the WY&H LMNS has a health inequalities dashboard, which allows us to compare the health and care outcomes of different population groups. This rich data has been key to developing the 10-week booking campaign. For example, the data shows that the proportion of late antenatal appointments varies by ethnicity across West Yorkshire. Late booking rates are highest for Black/Black British women and women from ‘Other Ethnic Groups.’ More specific analysis highlights Black Africans as having particularly high proportions of late antenatal booking across West Yorkshire. White British women were the least likely group to book late; however, because of the much larger population size, there are still many women booking late from this group. This means there is a significant opportunity to reduce late bookings for this group.
Having this kind of rich data is so important to developing effective health campaigns. It has enabled us to identify who we need to target with the campaign, where we needed to gather insight from and test campaign resources with, and we will also be using it to evaluate the campaign’s effectiveness.
It’s also vital that the campaign is developed with subject experts and those with lived experience. Through our existing close work on personalised care, we are working with midwifery professionals, maternity voice partnerships, the LMNS data analyst and with local women to co-create an antenatal campaign that will be meaningful, representative, and impactful across our communities.
So, in recent weeks we have been listening to seldom reached women, going to where they are and gaining a better understanding of some of their motivations and barriers around beginning their antenatal care in the earlier stages of pregnancy. We have been ‘unpeeling the onion’ and seeking to find out some of the root causes for late antenatal bookings.
This is the first public facing campaign led by the WY&H LMNS and it is a real opportunity to improve outcomes for local woman and their babies. We will soon be sharing a communications toolkit that will include publicity materials and information and advice for local use as we prepare to launch in August.
We want to make the campaign highly visible and reach the people and communities where it will make the biggest difference across Bradford District and Craven, Calderdale, Harrogate, Kirklees, Leeds, and Wakefield District. We would therefore value the support of all our allies working across West Yorkshire and Harrogate, in the voluntary and community sector and beyond to share promotional resources (as soon as they are available) about the importance of early booking in pregnancy.
If you would be able to share or display promotional resources in community spaces, include short articles in newsletters/bulletins or via your social media channels we kindly ask you get in touch by email to: Vicky.
Thank you for reading,
Sonya and Vicky
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