Administrative healthcare services

Tender description

HQIP has been requested to commission a Perinatal Mortality Review tool on behalf of the Department of Health in England and the Scottish and Welsh governments. National and regional perinatal confidential enquiries into unexplained stillbirths have found sub-optimal care factors contributed to babies' deaths in 3 quarters of cases. Around half of deaths might have been avoided with better care. Enquiries show wide variation of ways in which maternity units review and learn from such deaths and therefore opportunities to avoid repeated mistakes are missed. When done well, the review process into why a baby dies can highlight areas where future care can be improved and also provide good information for parents about why their baby died. In fact, if the UK could match mortality rates achieved in Sweden and Norway, the lives of at least 1 000 babies could be saved every year. The overarching aim of this programme is the development and maintenance of a web-based tool to implement standardised perinatal mortality reviews across NHS maternity and neonatal units in England, Scotland and Wales and provide training and on-going IT support for users. The programme will comprise: 1. The development and maintenance of a web-based tool to facilitate the introduction of standardised perinatal mortality reviews across NHS maternity and neonatal units in England, Scotland and Wales. This tool will help clinicians to review the circumstances and care leading up to and surrounding each stillbirth and neonatal deaths in a systematic way, identify any sub-optimal care factors and then based on responses to the questions in the data-set, provide a grading of care, creation of a local action plan and allow organisations to identify themes across multiple cases to facilitate organisational change to reduce risk. 2. Training in use of the tool and on-going IT support for users. 3. Annual analysis of UK and country-specific wide data and reporting on themes and trends. The contract for the programme will run for 3 years, with opportunities for the duration of the contract to be re-assessed at the end of each year subject to the availability of funding and an assessment by the Independent Advisory Group on the quality of delivery of the programme. There is also a potential to extend for up to a further 2 years.