I am Kirstin Webster, the neonatal clinical fellow on the National Maternity and Perinatal Audit (NMPA). I was an adult intensive care nurse before I made the move into neonates, working as a nurse in a tertiary level neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) before qualifying as an advanced neonatal nurse practitioner (ANNP) in May 2019. The job of an ANNP is one of a cross over between nursing and medical roles, using extensive nursing experience and advanced training to work on the medical rota. ANNPs are encouraged to participate teaching and research alongside their clinical work.
I am excited to join the NMPA team and work together to improve health services for women and babies. As a professional receiving feedback on the care you are giving is invaluable, as positive feedback but also, more importantly, to identify areas for quality improvement. The NMPA offers the opportunity for comparison of services at a local and national level, allowing an individual maternity service to benchmark their performance against others.
Following on from the NMPA report on Linking the National Maternity and Perinatal Audit Data Set to the National Neonatal Research Database for 2015/16, future sprint audits hope to link mother and baby data to explore associations between maternal antenatal and intrapartum factors, and neonatal outcomes. I am looking forward to working with the team to produce audit reports that are of benefit to service providers, policy makers, commissioners, charities and families.