Safer Maternity Care

Developed for NHS NES, Safer Maternity Care is a clinical decision support platform with accompanying MHRA-accredited mobile app for maternity risk assessment and maternity care planning.

Early identification and management of the risks associated with pregnancy is essential to providing appropriate treatment to pregnant women. In Scotland there are six areas that have been targeted for improved maternal care: post-partum haemorrhage, stillbirth, sepsis, venous thromboembolism, smoking cessation and appropriate induction of labour.

Effective identification of maternal risk and its subsequent management is guided by nationally recognised evidence and best practice. However, with so much evidence and practice guidelines available, health care staff can be overwhelmed by bureaucracy and can miss key clinical factors. Risk assessment is frequently carried out in an ad hoc manner, and is not always undertaken.

SCET has worked with NHS Borders and NHS Education Scotland to develop the SAFER (Safe Assessment Form to Evaluate Risk) maternity platform. SAFER is a risk assessment and risk management system that is used to assess antenatal risks and develop a comprehensive clinical management plan. It consists of a clinical decision support rules engine with rules that can be amended by key clinicians for each Healthboard/CCG.

The system then allows clinicians (eg. GPs, consultants, midwives) to enter relevant patient information at each hospital appointment during pregnancy and the system with calculate the risk to the pregnant woman and produce an appropriate care management plan. The patient data can be entered both within a primary of secondary care setting using a computer but can also be used in the community on the SAFER app (available on iOS and Android). The patient can also use the app to see their care management plan.