In March 2016, the Saving Babies’ Lives Care Bundle was launched in England. This program was part of a coordinated effort to reduce stillbirths, neonatal and maternal deaths by 50% by 2025. As a result of this program there was a significant increase in demand for obstetric sonography services, and especially for 3rd trimester obstetric ultrasound. In order to address this capacity issue, HEE funded the training of approximately 200 staff in 2017/18. In March 2019, NHS updated the Saving Babies’ Lives Care Bundle with a version 2. This built upon the existing framework and extended the requirement for obstetric sonography.
HEE commissioned this project to assess how effective the 2017/18 training program has been and understand what are the current and further workforce gap in obstetric sonography given the changes required in version 2 of the Saving Babies’ Lives Care Bundle.
In this project, we collected quantitative and qualitative data through surveys, interviews and workshops with participants in the training program, line managers in NHS trusts and other key stakeholders. Using a framework based on the Kirkpatrick Model we assessed the effectiveness of the training program. A supply-demand model was built to assess the workforce gaps in terms of overall obstetric sonography as well as the specific techniques outlined in version 1 and 2 of the Saving Babies’ Lives Care Bundles.
United Kingdom
National Health Service (NHS) England
2020
The results of the project have been used by HEE for workforce planning. The scope of additional obstetric sonography training programs, as well as the size of future trainee cohorts, have been based on the results of this project.
