Maternity Voices Pennine Lancashire advocates for pregnant women, people and families and works alongside the providers and commissioners of services in East Lancashire (Ribble Valley, Hyndburn, Pendle, Burnley and Rossendale) and Blackburn with Darwen to support co-produced maternity care.
You are welcome to get involved!
The Maternity Voices Partnership (MVP) includes service users (that’s women and people who are pregnant or have given birth, their families and supporters), service providers (such as midwives, infant feeding teams and health visitors), commissioners (who decide what services are needed by local people), local parenting charities and community interest companies, NICU staff and GPs. The MVP is chaired by a service user and actively seeks the involvement of other service users through different means, such as meetings, email, Facebook groups and feedback from groups in the community. We are also networked with other MVPs in the Lancashire and South Cumbria area, across the North West region, and nationally.
The MVP works together to find ways to improve services, both by providing feedback and also ‘co-producing’ services. Co-production means working as a team to develop ideas and solutions, so service users have an equal voice, it’s not just the providers or commissioners deciding what and how to do things. We also work with the providers to help improve communication about the services so that the information provided is accessible and useful.
The MVP Chair and other Service User representatives are involved in the Better Births transformation programme, which consists of a number of different projects to improve maternity services. These changes will affect, for example, how many different midwives you will see in your pregnancy and how your care is managed, the choices and personalisation of your care, your experience in the postnatal phase, the IT systems being used to manage your notes and so on.
Importantly, we are also working to reduce health inequalities, including those which affect people from a Black, Black British, Asian, Asian British or other minoritised ethnicity background, those for whom written or spoken English is difficult to understand and those in digital exclusion.
If you would like to get involved, please get in touch with us:
Email: elccg.penninelancsmvp@nhs.net
Facebook Messenger: m.me/MaternityVoicesPennineLancashire
Twitter: @MVP_PennineLanc
Below are the Terms of Reference for the Maternity Voices Partnership, detailing how it works, who is involved and what the purpose of the group is: