Resources for Perinatal Professionals

Here you will find a links to further information on a variety of topics which you might come across during your work.

You can contact us via nss.perinatalnetwork@nhs.scot if you have a resource you think would be helpful to include here.

Please note we are unable to promote for-profit organisations and products and/or services delivered by these.

Antenatal Optimisation Toolkit

BAPM’s Antenatal Optimisation Toolkit is not intended to be read as mandatory guidance. Instead it is a practical resource from which units who wish to improve compliance rates of antenatal optimisation measures can select the most suitable interventions for their particular context.

Amongst other measures, BAPM recommends that “Singleton infants less than 27 weeks of gestation, multiples less than 28 weeks of gestation and any gestation with an estimated fetal weight of less than 800g should be born in a maternity service on the same site as a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU)”.

BAPM

The British Association of Perinatal Medicine produce several BAPM Frameworks for Practice

Exception Reporting Tool for births <27 weeks in a unit or centre without a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU)

The Scottish Perinatal Network (SPN) has therefore developed an Exception Reporting tool which can be used in the event this does not happen:

2022-06-01 SPN Exception Reporting Proforma – Birth < 27 Weeks in a Unit or Centre without a NICU

Please complete as much of the Proforma as possible and return it to your local board contact and the SPN on nss.perinatalnetwork@nhs.scot.
Data protection measures are in place. For more information on how the NHS handles personal health information please see here.

Significant Adverse Event Reviews

  • You can read the SPN’s SAER Scoping Report on our Publications page
  • Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS) Learning systems – Adverse Events Community of Practice (CoP)
    • A new SharePoint Adverse Events (AE) CoP, hosted on MS Teams, piloted in May 2022. It includes a collaborative AE toolkit, hosts meeting and event documentation, and an NHS board discussion space where risk and governance leads can ask questions and share ideas and knowledge about their local processes and experiences.
    • On 30 November 2023 the national AE learning platform will be launched as the central hub for the site. Each NHS board will have ownership of its own area of the site. Learning summaries will be uploaded to encourage national learning alongside other information which may be of interest
  • NHS Education for Scotland (NES) – Education and Training
    In response to perinatal guidance section: 4.b.5 Supporting staff training and wellbeing, NES provides resources for NHS staff involved in adverse event reviews and those in leadership/management positions.  They include learning from safety incidents in complex care environments and building a safety culture and other associated areas. Find details on the Patient Safety Zone on TURAS Learn. NES also provides:

    • The Human Factors Hub which will contain a range of new learning resources and courses (face-to-face, online and hybrid).  Some of this is in the development and testing phase.

Transport:

The Scottish Neonatal Transport Service is part of ScotSTAR (Scottish Specialist Transport and Retrieval), a division of the Scottish Ambulance Service. It is a specialist service dedicated to the safe transport of unwell newborn infants throughout Scotland and on occasion when Scottish babies require transferred further afield. For more information please go to: https://www.neonataltransport.scot.nhs.uk/

Specific guidance to support effective transport in remote and rural areas is available here.

For Parents