AIMS Campaign Team Spring Update - ready for the year ahead!

AIMS Journal, 2026, Vol 38, No 2

From the AIMS Campaigns Team

Spring has certainly sprung in the Campaigns Team, with some very welcome team changes that set us up well for the rest of the year. Of particular note is that we now have representation in the team for all four nations of the UK.

After much collaboration and many meetings, Nadia Higson represented AIMS at a National Maternity and Neonatal Collective group meeting with Wes Streeting and Baroness Amos, facilitated by Make Birth Better, where she made the case for midwifery Continuity of Carer. AIMS also put in its own submission to the review - a team effort, but thanks in particular to Alex Smith.

Now we await the Amos Review final report which is due to be published in June. When that report is delivered, it will be considered by a Taskforce led by health secretary James Murray. We are pleased that AIMS has secured a place on the Charities and Third Sector Organisation 'expert reference group', feeding into the Taskforce. A preparatory expert reference group meeting took place in May, which Jo Dagustun attended for us.

AIMS was recently invited to participate in a new 'Homebirth Standards & Framework' working group, which is expected to meet until the Autumn. Catherine Williams is our representative there. This issue is incredibly important for AIMS, in terms of ensuring that our maternity services are designed and run to ensure that women can access high quality labour and birth support in their own homes.

At the same time, new research highlights the reduction in the numbers of women birthing in midwife-led birth centres. This runs counter to what we would expect, given the good evidence telling us how important and beneficial these birthplace options are. All this has given us a good incentive to review our 'place of birth' workstream, so we are working through that. It is good to see, too, the work of local groups and individuals campaigning for the retention of birth centres and homebirth options. Such local work is incredibly important. We look forward to an opportunity for reflection as the Midwifery Unit Network celebrates its 10 Year Anniversary later this year.

We continue our work as a member of the NHS England Maternity and Neonatal Stakeholder Council. Given plans to abolish NHS England, the future role of this group is uncertain, but it has been recommissioned for 2026/27. Jo Dagustun attended the annual awayday of that group at the end of April, where the key issue of accountability came under the spotlight, in addition to other agenda items.

A key focus for AIMS in this context is the need for a proper review of the implementation and impact of the Three Year Delivery Plan (established by NHS England in 2023). This was intended as a ‘recovery plan’, which AIMS hoped would help us get back to the transformation work demanded by Better Births (2016). Has it delivered?

Ruth Weston is now facilitating the Charities and Third Sector Maternity Continuity Network - thank you Ruth! Jo Dagustun will also attend for AIMS.

All campaign team members, including Anne Glover and Camille Del Pozo, are looking into the current debates about staffing and working conditions, developing a new AIMS position paper on personalised care, reviewing the newly published Scottish standards for maternity care and taking stock of our physiology informed maternity services campaign. Jo Dagustun has been out to talk recently to midwifery students in York about that campaign, and gained some useful feedback. We also have Northern Ireland and Wales activity to scrutinise and contribute to, of course.

Jo Dagustun represented us at this year's European Network of Childbirth Associations (ENCA) meetings in Warsaw, where she was able to brief other members on the state of maternity policy in the UK, and in turn gain information and inspiration from our colleagues there.

Please have a look at the website, including the journal, to keep abreast of our work. We have a commitment to publishing all of our key activities there, in the interests of openness and transparency.

We are always happy to collaborate with fellow members of the maternity services improvement community, so if anything here piques your interest or you’d like to raise with us another issue, do feel welcome to get in touch. We would love to hear from you.