All women and babies should have access to high quality antenatal and newborn screening programmes.
To support this aim, we – the London screening quality assurance service (SQAS) team – held a forum for screening coordinators and infectious diseases midwives from all the maternity units in the capital on Friday 30 October 2015.
We discussed the new national standards for the infectious diseases screening programme to ensure that delegates were up to speed with the changes. There were networking opportunities for screening coordinators and infectious diseases midwives to build relationships and share good practice.
During the day, presentations were given by two London screening co-ordinators: Kate Israel and Louise Frost. There was also a very informative presentation on the national dried bloodspot testing service offered by Public Health England for babies born to hepatitis B positive mothers
All the presentations from the forum can be downloaded here:
1. Antenatal updates - Michelle Onlsow
2. Antenatal screening audit 2015 – Kate Israel
3. Newborn updates – Michelle Onlsow
4. MMR audit – Louise Frost
5. Incidents themes; shared learning – Michelle Onslow
6. Hepatitis b newborn dried bloodspots – Philip Keel
The forum ended with group work looking at the practical aspects of performing screening audits and writing local guidelines for screening programmes.
A few comments from the participants included
Enjoyable day, very informative especially regarding QA visit"
"Content was very relevant to key issues in screening, QA team very approachable.
Thank you to everyone who attended and in particular our speakers. More details of the next London forum will follow soon. If you would like to present at it, please email PHE.LondonQA@nhs.net.
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