In line with Better births:
Personalised care, centred on the woman, her baby & her family, based around their needs & their decisions, where they have genuine choice, informed by unbiased information.
i. Every woman should develop a personalised care plan, with her midwife and other health professionals, which sets out her decisions about her care, reflects her wider health needs and is kept up to date as her pregnancy progresses.
ii. Unbiased information should be made available to all women to help them make their decisions and develop their care plan. This should be through their own digital maternity tool, which enables them to access their own health records and information that is appropriate to them, including the latest evidence and what services are available locally.
iii. They should be able to choose the provider of their antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal care and be in control of exercising those choices through their own NHS Personal Maternity Care Budget.
iv. Women should be able to make decisions about the support they need during birth and where they would prefer to give birth, whether this is at home, in a midwifery unit or in an obstetric unit, after full discussion of the benefits and risks associated with each option.
Delyse Maidman
The development of personalised care plans for women and their families to make along with the HCP is what I feel is an essential part of the portal. For this I do think that the portal needs to be able to offer better access to information than just PDF's as it seems to be at present.