In this blog, Sarah Fisher reflects on her experience of being a member of the National Maternity and Perinatal Audit Women and Families Involvement Group.
Over the last four years I've been privileged to contribute my patient voice to the work of the National Maternity and Perinatal Audit (NMPA), as a member of the Women and Families Involvement Group. As my term draws to an end, I wanted to reflect on my time on the group, what I’ve helped achieve, and to encourage others with more recent lived experience to take on the baton.
My motivation
Four years ago, my twins were approaching their third birthday when I saw the NMPA’s call for women and partners with recent maternity experiences to help inform the audit through lived experience and lay perspectives. I was pleased to see that multiple birth was one of the experiences they were keen to have represented. The opportunity to promote positive outcomes for other service-users and make the audit’s publications more relevant and accessible to parents particularly appealed due to my personal maternity journey.
When I became pregnant with what I planned to be my second and final child, I was shocked, to say the least, to find out that I was to become a mum of three. When considering where and how to give birth to my twins, I was anxious and keen to make my own decisions informed by good evidence – but I was frustrated and dismayed by the limited data and information on multiple birth risks and outcomes.
Researching and advocating for the choices which I felt were right for me and my babies wasn’t easy. But I was conscious that many other women face additional inequalities and barriers and have less autonomy. This was all part of my motivation to join.
More recently, I've learnt that I'm autistic. Looking back, this certainly shaped my maternity and early parenthood experiences and has helped me understand my perinatal mental health struggles. So, I’ve also brought a neurodivergent perspective, and it has been satisfying and somewhat cathartic to put my experiences to positive use, helping drive improvements and changes to benefit others.
Some highlights
Over the past four years, I’ve contributed to the audit in a variety of ways, including:
- Helping prioritise clinical measures that matter most to women and families
- Supporting the development of the Family Gateway
- Representing patient perspectives at Clinical Reference Group meetings
- Suggesting topics for snapshot audits
- Reviewing publications to make them clearer and more useful for public audiences
- Helping select family-friendly imagery
- Sharing ideas for more inclusive communications to reach a wider range of families
What I'm most proud of is how I've supported an increased focus on multiple birth data and related outcomes for mothers and babies, and provided a consistent voice advocating for multiple birth families. Collaborating with Twins Trust and the Elizabeth Bryan Multiple Birth Centre, I’ve been part of improving and standardising multiple birth metrics, including through maternity services data set updates. The biggest achievement has been the recent Multiple Birth Snapshot Audit. This report paves the way for the inclusion of multiple birth data in NMPA’s future annual reports, as well as making recommendations to improve multiple birth data collection. I was excited to speak about that alongside NMPA Lead George Dunn, at a Maternity and Healthcare Inequalities webinar as part of HQIP Clinical Audit Awareness Week.
Why join?
It’s such an enjoyable and rewardable group to be part of. It’s fascinating to hear and learn from the diverse experiences, backgrounds and perspectives of other members. We have and bring all sorts of experiences and insights, be it relating to positive or negative birth and care experiences, various health conditions and outcomes, or different infant feeding journeys. We may have different views and opinions, yet we're all united by a desire to improve maternity data, with the end goal of driving better maternity services and better maternal and infant health.
You’ll be offered a variety of opportunities to both input and learn. Your lived experience, views and ideas will be valued and utilised to shape and improve the audit, making it more impactful and the information more accessible for other patients and parents. So why not lend your voice?
Find out more
- Find out how to apply to be a member of the Women and Families Involvement Group
- Read about Sarah's twin birth and autistic birth experiences
- Find Sarah on LinkedIn