Pregnancy
UK government pledges to improve maternity services after damning report
Measures to be taken on a national level to further improve safety standards in maternity care

The UK government will take nationwide action to improve maternity services across the NHS following concerns about the quality of care provided by a trust in the South East of England.
The government has published its full response to an independent review – led by former regional director of public health, Dr Bill Kirkup – into maternity failings at East Kent Hospitals NHS Trust.
The review, launched because of concerns about the quality of care being provided by the trust, found that at least 45 babies might have survived with better care at East Kent NHS.
In response, women’s health minister, Maria Caulfield, has announced she will chair a new group overseeing maternity services nationwide with the aim of bringing together key people from the NHS and other organisations.
The initiative will look across work being carried out by a range of programmes set up to improve maternity and neonatal care, including the implementation of Dr Kirkup’s and other recommendations.
“Every woman deserves to feel confident in the care they and their baby receive,” Caulfield said in a statement.
“I’d like to thank Dr Kirkup and all those involved in investigating the circumstances behind what’s happened in these horrendous cases.
“In particular, I’d like to thank the women and their families, who have gone through so much pain, for engaging with the investigation and helping it reach its findings.
“I’m determined to see safety standards in maternity and neonatal care improve across the country. While this invaluable report focuses on the situation in East Kent, I want to see its recommendations implemented nationwide.”
In East Kent in particular, the minister said she would chair a local forum bringing together local NHS representatives, the Care Quality Commission and local MPs to share information and updates on the improvements being made to maternity services.
She has also appointed Kirkup to lead work with healthcare partners in response to two of the key recommendations, helping to ensure teams in maternity and neonatal care across England can work together more collaboratively.
Organisations from across the health and care system – including the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Royal College of Midwives – have been asked by the government to support its efforts to promote and improve team-working in healthcare settings.
Royal colleges, professional regulators and employers have also been asked to investigate how they can improve workplace culture so standards of professional behaviour in maternity and neonatal settings are high. They will consider what appropriate action can be taken if high standards fail to be met.
Kirkup said: “I see the government’s response to ‘Reading the signals’ as an important step forward in addressing the issues that I identify.
“I welcome the opportunity to lead this significant work and I look forward to drawing together an action group to advise me in doing so.”
Dr Matthew Jolly, national clinical director for maternity review and women’s health at NHS England, said: “We welcome the government’s response to Dr Bill Kirkup’s report – the failings in care for women, babies and their families using East Kent Hospital must not continue to be repeated.
“NHS England has installed an improvement director at the trust alongside a senior advisor, and both are providing expert practical advice to the organisation on the actions it needs to implement to improve its maternity and neonate care, while senior national NHS clinical leaders are regularly visiting both maternity units to monitor progress.
“In March, we published a delivery plan for maternity and neonatal care, which sets out what the NHS will do over the next three years to make care safer, more personalised and more equitable for all women, babies and families.”
Pregnancy
New reporting tool targets maternal-fetal teams as pregnancy complexity rises

A new reporting tool built specifically for obstetrics and maternal-fetal medicine has launched, aimed at teams managing increasingly complex pregnancies with limited time and resources.
Trice Imaging has released Trice Workspace Reporting, which connects imaging, reporting and longitudinal patient data in a single workflow to support faster clinical decision making.
Birth rates are falling worldwide, but pregnancies are getting more complicated. Advanced maternal age, IVF-assisted pregnancies, rising obesity rates and a higher prevalence of hypertension and diabetes mean more cases now require specialist monitoring, advanced imaging and multidisciplinary care.
At the same time, clinical teams are stretched and facing growing administrative demands.
Trice Workspace Reporting brings together customisable reporting, dynamic pregnancy dating and longitudinal patient history with an AI-ready, EHR-interoperable infrastructure, all inside the company’s Tricefy image management platform.
The company says it aims to accelerate standardised and synchronised report turnaround, support timely clinical decisions and improve operational efficiency for fetal medicine services.
“Maternal fetal medicine teams are managing increasingly complex pregnancies while being asked to do more with limited time and resources,” said Mark A. Samii, chief revenue officer at Trice Imaging.
“Trice Workspace Reporting is designed to remove unnecessary friction from reporting by creating a structured digital foundation that supports today’s need for connected clinical workflows.
“It also provides a digital foundation as practices prepare for tomorrow and the evolution of AI-enabled fetal assessment, anomaly detection and outcome prediction technologies.”
Trice Imaging describes its mission as transforming the women’s health journey by connecting physicians, patients and healthcare systems. From independent practices to large hospital ecosystems, it aims to reach the entire women’s health continuum, spanning IVF and reproductive health, maternal-fetal medicine and OB/GYN, and onwards to lifelong women’s health.
For more than 17 years the firm has worked on cloud-based storage, retrieval, display, organisation and exchange of ultrasound medical images and associated information across health environments.
Its wider platform now extends to dynamic clinical reporting, AI-driven workflow optimisation, data analytics and secure patient engagement.
Trice Imaging holds regulatory and data protection clearances in 40 countries. It has offices in Miami and Stockholm, alongside a growing network of global distributors.
Opinion
Women’s Health has waited long enough for innovation

By Dr Fran Conti-Ramsden, clinician at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, academic at King’s College London, and chief medical officer of MEGI Health.
A woman gives birth. A few days later she goes home, often with a bag of medication for her blood pressure, and then, very often, very little structured follow-up for her heart (cardiovascular) health.
In my clinical work, and through our collaboration with Action on Pre-eclampsia, I see and hear about this postnatal cliff edge again and again, and it still shocks me.
We invest a lot of medical care and attention whilst a woman or birthing individual is pregnant, then, at the very moment emerging evidence suggests we have a window of opportunity to modify long-term health, the support falls away.
That cliff edge is a symptom of a deeper issue: we have come to treat “women’s health” as a synonym for reproductive health. Pregnancy, periods and fertility, important as they are, have crowded out everything else.
Yet the conditions that do most to shorten and limit women’s lives are not reproductive at all.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in women worldwide, and it is still too readily thought of as a man’s problem.
Heart disease in women is more likely to be missed and under-treated, in part because for decades women were under-represented in the research that built our knowledge.
Pregnancy makes this vivid.
Conditions such as pre-eclampsia are not only risks to be managed for nine months; they are early warnings about a woman’s future, markers that she is more likely to develop heart disease and high blood pressure in the years to come.
We have the knowledge to act on that. What we mostly do instead is discharge her and look away.
This is exactly the kind of problem better tools should help us solve: spotting risk earlier, supporting women and their clinicians through the vulnerable postnatal window, and providing continuity where the system currently provides a drop due to lack of capacity.
Artificial intelligence and digital health have real potential here; in risk prediction, in monitoring blood pressure at home, and in helping stretched clinicians know who needs attention and when.
And yet this is not where most of the energy is going.
It is far easier to build, fund and scale an app that tracks a cycle than a tool that changes the trajectory of a woman’s heart.
So, innovation clusters at the lighter, lower-risk end of innovation, while the conditions that actually kill and disable women, and moments like the postnatal cliff, stay under-served.
Closing the women’s health gap could add at least a trillion dollars to the global economy each year, the World Economic Forum estimates, but the bigger prize is women living longer, healthier lives.
None of this means technology is a cure in itself. It is a tool, and a tool built carelessly can do harm.
Because women have been under-represented in medical data, systems trained on that data can quietly carry the same blind spots forward, deepening inequalities rather than closing them.
Responsible innovation, with clinical-grade evidence, privacy and equity designed in from the start, and tools built around real clinical pathways rather than bolted on afterwards, is not a brake on progress.
It is the only version of progress worth having.
I am optimistic, because a serious community is forming around exactly these questions and the appetite to get it right is real.
It is why, at MEGI, we are bringing clinicians, researchers, founders, regulators and investors together for our AI × Women’s Health summit on 25 June.
If we keep our focus on the conditions that matter most to women’s lives, and build the tools to meet them responsibly, the postnatal cliff edge could become something else entirely: the moment the system finally catches her and delivers preventative healthcare.
AI × Women’s Health: Innovation, Challenges and Opportunities summit is taking place on Thursday 25 June 2026 at the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering. The event is free and is fully booked and operating a waiting list. Join the waiting list here.
About Dr Fran Conti-Ramsden
Dr Fran Conti-Ramsden is a UK Obstetrics and Gynaecology registrar and Chadburn Clinical Lecturer at KCL passionate about transforming women’s health through technology and innovation.
Combining NHS clinical experience with an MRC-funded PhD, recent NHS Clinical AI fellowship and commercial role as Chief Medical Officer at Megi health, she works at the intersection of clinical medicine, data science, technology and AI.
Her current programme of research focuses on the intersection of healthcare and technology; leveraging advances such as smartphone based vital signs capture and large language models to drive forward scalable innovation in maternal cardiovascular care.
She has published over 20 peer-reviewed manuscripts (See gScholar, h-index 12), including award-winning work recognized by Hypertension Journal.
She was awarded an AI visionary award in 2025 by Health Innovation KSS was the recipient of the 2024 International Society for the Study of Hypertension in Pregnancy Zuspan prize.
Pregnancy
Women with pre-eclampsia at increased risk of chronic kidney disease, study finds

Women who develop pre-eclampsia face a higher risk of chronic kidney disease and high blood pressure later in life, new research suggests.
The amount of protein found in the urine during pregnancy may help identify those at greatest risk of developing long-term health problems.
Pre-eclampsia usually involves high blood pressure and increased protein in the urine. Some women also experience severe headaches and changes to their vision.
The condition cannot be treated during pregnancy and, in some cases, labour must be induced early to protect both the woman and baby.
The study found that the condition may be linked to longer-term health problems.
Anne Høy Seemann Vestergaard, a medical doctor and PhD at the department of clinical medicine at Aarhus University, said: “What we can see is a clear association between pre-eclampsia and the development of high blood pressure, chronic kidney disease and cardiovascular disease later in life.”
The researchers found that the amount of protein passed in the urine during pregnancy was linked to the risk of developing chronic conditions after giving birth.
Protein in the urine can indicate that the kidneys are not filtering blood normally.
Vestergaard said: “The most surprising finding was how clearly the amount of protein in the urine during pre-eclampsia was linked to the risk of later high blood pressure and chronic kidney disease. Women with moderate to severe protein excretion had a higher risk of both conditions compared with women with low or no protein excretion.”
Among women with pre-eclampsia and moderate to severe levels of protein in the urine, around one in 20 developed chronic kidney disease within 10 years and around one in six developed high blood pressure.
Most women in the study did not develop long-term complications, but the researchers said the increased risk should still be taken seriously because the potential effects can be severe.
Vestergaard said: “At first glance, this may sound like a low number, but it represents a markedly increased risk when the groups are compared. In the group with pre-eclampsia and high levels of protein in the urine, around 1 in 20 women developed chronic kidney disease within ten years, including early stages of the disease, compared with around 1 in 100 in the group with lower or no protein excretion.”
She added: “That is a considerable number in light of the fact that chronic kidney disease is a potentially serious condition that can progress to kidney failure if isn’t diagnosed early.”
The findings suggest women who experience pre-eclampsia may benefit from more systematic monitoring after pregnancy.
Vestergaard said: “Our study suggests that these women may benefit from monitoring of blood pressure and kidney function after pregnancy.”
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