About Maternity Voices Partnership

What is a Maternity Voices Partnership?

The Maternity Voices Partnership (MVP) collects and collates feedback from Service Users in order to drive service improvements and improve the quality of maternity services.

  • The MVP is an independent team made up of women and their families;
  • commissioners (who plan, buy and monitor services);
  • providers (who deliver services such as midwives and doctors);
  • the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), who commission health services, and
  • the Local Authority (LA), who commission public health and social care and support services.

At the core are the service users who are the voice of change.

An MVP provides a way for this team of people to design and improve maternity care together. All these different people working together to share ideas and identify solutions for the design and improvement of maternity care is called co-production.

The function of the MVP is more than simply to listen: it is a way of discussing challenges and ways of overcoming them, across Shropshire (including Powys) and Telford & Wrekin, through co-produced solutions.

The Shropshire Telford & Wrekin MVP

The Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin MVP is led by our service user chair and development officer and they support a team of volunteers who each represent a different area in maternity care.

Our Team

Emily Evans

Emily Evans

Services User Chair

Hi I’m Emily. I’m a mum to two amazing girls born in 2017 and 2020. I have a passion for improving maternity services and the difference that can be made through the Maternity Voices Partnership. I am dedicated to ensuring that all peoples voices are heard and their experiences are used to shape the future of services within the county.

Angela Loughlin

Angela Loughlin

Development Co-ordinator

Hi, I’m Angela and I’m covering the Development Co-ordinator post whilst Louise is on maternity leave. I joined the team in September 2022, and hope I can continue to build upon the remarkable work that has been carried out since the MVP was formed in 2018. I’m passionate about women’s health and ensuring every woman has a voice in determining their care.

What do we do?

  • We gather feedback from people who have recently used maternity service in the local area. We do this in several different ways, including an on-line feedback form and going out into the community to talk to people with our team of volunteers. Our aim is to enable everybody’s voice to be heard.
  • We host meetings and focus groups, which are face-to-face discussion groups, on specific maternity themes, to build an accurate picture of the needs and experiences of families in the area. We then feed this information back so that when new services are developed, or existing services are changed, then we can be sure that the service user voice has been heard.
  • The feedback we gather is regularly analysed and themes and priorities are fed back to the Local Maternity and Neonatal System Programme Board to guide where changes and improvements need to be made to support the implementation of Better Births across the county.
  • We attend local, regional and national events to network and ensure all families are heard (paying particular attention to those within seldom heard groups).
  • We ‘walk the patch’ and do the ‘15 steps’ challenge (highlight this with a link to https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/15-steps-inpatient.pdf within the local maternity units and hospitals, and help ensure facilities and care meet the needs of the people using them