Maternity Standards – Focus group with Healthcare Improvement Scotland

Share your views to inform new Standards for Maternity Care

The Health and Social Care Alliance (the ALLIANCE) will be hosting a focus group, on behalf of Healthcare Improvement Scotland, to inform new Standards for Maternity Care. The standards set out what everyone accessing maternity care in Scotland should expect to experience. The standards will also help services to identify areas for improvement. You can access the standards from the Healthcare Improvement Scotland website.

The focus group will take place online on Teams on Thursday 30 October from 1pm to 2pm. This session is for anyone who has had experience of accessing maternity services in Scotland. This could be a current or past experience.

If you are interested in finding out more and taking part, please get in touch with us at whp@alliance-scotland.org.uk to express your interest. If there is anything we can do to support your participation in the session then please let us know when registering.

Please note this session may touch on themes that people may find difficult. Themes may include fertility and assisted reproduction, abortion, miscarriage, and baby loss, as well as more general questions about pregnancy, childbirth, and aftercare.

There is limited space for this focus group. We will operate a waiting list if the session is popular.

More information below on Healthcare Improvement Scotland.

Who are we?

Healthcare Improvement Scotland has been commissioned by the Scottish Government to develop Standards for Maternity Care.

Standards describe how a service should be designed to make sure that the care it delivers is safe, effective and person-centred.

The scope detailing the population, settings and areas to be covered by the Standards for Maternity Care can be found here.

What do we want from this focus group?

We are arranging this focus group because the draft Standards for Maternity Care are scheduled to be published for consultation on Wednesday 17 September 2025 on the Healthcare Improvement Scotland website. The consultation phase will end on Friday 7 November 2025.

During consultation, we would like to hear from people who have experienced maternity care in Scotland. We are determined to make sure that maternity services provide high quality care and support for everyone, wherever they live and whatever their circumstances.

How will we use this information?

We will take notes during the focus group so that we can use any comments to make changes to the draft standards, if necessary. All notes will be anonymised.

We may use the Microsoft Teams transcription feature to help us take notes and ensure we don’t miss anything important that you say. If we use this feature, we will let you know, and we will destroy the transcription after we have completed our notes.

If you have any questions, please email us at: his.standardsandindicators@nhs.scot

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