Summary
This National Audit Office (NAO) Report
‘Caring
for Vulnerable Babies’ (HC 101) examines the reorganisation of neonatal
services in England.
In 2006, 635,748 babies were born in
England, with 62,471 babies (approximately 10% of all births) admitted to
neonatal units. Babies require neonatal care because they are premature, have a
low birth weight or suffer from illness or a condition, such as a heart defect.
This Report highlights a trend in low weight babies increasing in the UK
and other developed countries. Premature babies are the result of a number of
factors, including maternal age, obesity, smoking, ethnic origin, deprivation
and assisted conception such as IVF. In addition, the number of women giving
birth at 40 years of age or more has more than doubled since 1986.
The
NAO sets out a number of findings and recommendations, including:
- There is widespread support for neonatal services to be delivered through
managed clinical networks, but these networks have evolved at different rates
in different areas
- Most clinical networks have made progress in
reducing long-distance transfers, but only half provide specialist transport
services 24 hours a day, seven days a week
- There has been an
improvement in communication between clinical networks
- There are still
capacity problems that undermine the effectiveness and efficiency of neonatal
care, and that this is often due to a shortage of nurses
- Greater
account should be taken of parent's needs when neonatal care in required, such
as communication with medical staff, information about the babies' care and
accommodation for the parents
- The costs of neonatal services are not
fully understood, and there is a mismatch between costs and charges.
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