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Picture of a woman with a baby with text: 'Strategy for Excellence in Maternity Care'


At East Kent Hospitals, we are on a journey of improvement to provide high quality maternity care for women and their families, and to learn the lessons from past failures.

We are determined that we will be open and transparent about the improvements we need to make to our maternity service.  We have already made a number of improvements, but we are clear that more needs to be done. 

We have listened to women and families – to those who have received excellent care, and those we have failed by not providing the right standard of care. To these women and families we are profoundly sorry.

We have also listened to the views of our own multi-professional staff on what values and skills they need to be equipped with, in order to deliver a safe high quality service.

We have taken on board what’s been said and we have published our Strategy for Excellence in Maternity Care.

Our strategy is one of continuous improvement, creating the right environment for our staff to be able to implement best practice and to have the confidence to raise concerns when standards are not being met. It’s our commitment to the women and families of east Kent to work tirelessly to provide high quality maternity care, which is safe, effective and centred on the women that need it.

Our strategy incorporates recommendations from independent investigations, findings and feedback into maternity care at East Kent Hospitals to ensure the recommendations and lessons learned from these are fully embedded. This includes the NHS England maternity support programme, NHS Improvement, the Care Quality Commission, Kent and Medway Clinical Commissioning Group, Kent and Medway Local Maternity Systems, the Maternity Voices Partnership and Healthwatch Kent.