Attendees from across the country took part in a special webinar on Tuesday 6 March to learn more about the next steps for our initiative to prevent cerebral palsy in premature babies.
PReCePT, which stands for the Prevention of Cerebral Palsy in PreTerm Labour, has been designed to help reduce cerebral palsy in babies by administering magnesium sulphate (MgSO4) to mothers during preterm labour, at a cost of around £1 per individual dose.
Following the successful rollout of PreCePT to all five acute trusts in the West of England in 2016, the project is now benefitting from £0.5 million in ‘Scaling Up’ funding from the Health Foundation so that it can be introduced to a further 10 hospital trusts in the South, North West and South West of England, Midlands, Wales and London. Find out more about here.
Participants in the webinar explored the lessons learned from the project so far and looked ahead to what lies in store with a wider national rollout of PReCePT.
Dr Karen Luyt is a Consultant in Neonatal Medicine at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust and has been the project lead for PReCePT since it was first launched in 2014. Karen talked through the background to the project and provided an overview of how it was initially implemented in the West of England.
Karen was then joined by Hannah Bailey, formerly of Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust, who provided the midwife’s perspective on the project, followed by Dr Emma Treloar from University Hospitals Bristol who gave the obstetrician’s view.
Dr Tony Kelly, National Clinical Director at NHS Improvement for the National Maternal and Neonatal Health Safety Collaborative looked ahead to how a wider national rollout of PreCePT3 would ‘be nested’ within the Collaborative’s work, particularly the objective to ‘improve optimisation and stabilisation of the very preterm infant’. This national programme is supported by the 15 Patient Safety Collaboratives, each of which is hosted by its local Academic Health Science Network.
Ann Remmers, Patient Safety Programme Director at the West of England AHSN, concluded the webinar by looking at what support we would be able to provide as part of a national rollout through the AHSN Network.
The Q&As from the webinar will be available shortly and published here. Watch this space!
For more information on PReCePT, please contact ps@weahsn.net.
Posted on March 7, 2018
