AIMS Campaigns: our key priorities for 2022/23

AIMS Journal, 2022, Vol 34, No 2

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By the AIMS Campaigns Team

The AIMS mission statement calls for us to “campaign for a system which truly meets the needs of all.” More recently, the AIMS Campaigns Team has expanded on this, noting that, “We campaign for improvements in the maternity services based on a principle of proportionate universalism, to ensure that we have both high-quality services for all and services that are equitable and address inequity.” In this piece, we explain what this means in practice, by offering readers an update on our key priorities for 2022/23.

AIMS is just one player in a complex and dynamic UK maternity service improvement community, but we believe we play a unique campaigning role within this community through:

• Making a strong and persistent case for change on key maternity service improvement issues
• Providing ongoing critical scrutiny, tracking developments in policy and practice, and holding government and the maternity services to account
• Responding frequently and robustly to consultations and policy documents
• Engaging others and raising awareness of issues via a range of campaigning outputs

Over the last year, we have developed a number of action-oriented Position Papers on key issues in the maternity services. We hope these will support campaigning by both our own Volunteers and other birth activists. We consider all of these topics - and others - to be important, but for the coming year we plan to focus our efforts on the following five aspects. We believe that progress in these areas would go far to address a number of our other concerns:

• Our call for physiology-informed maternity services.
• Our ongoing call for relational care for all (Continuity of Carer). We will continue to lobby for full, transparent monitoring of progress towards the targets included in the national maternity improvement plans of the four nations of the UK, and for the development of a vision for the next steps for delivering this model of care.
• Our ongoing support for, and scrutiny of, the Maternity Transformation Programme for England, including the implementation of the Better Births recommendations. Our ambition is to build a Volunteers base which would enable us to provide similar scrutiny of the corresponding programmes in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
• Our support for initiatives to deliver equity in the maternity services, including addressing racial inequalities. We will also continue to support the efforts of other organisations who are campaigning specifically on this topic.
• Our work to address maternity service issues needing urgent attention in the context of the Covid 19 pandemic.

We look forward to working across each of these priority areas, alongside a wide range of colleagues across the maternity service improvement community.

We are particularly keen to recruit new Volunteers from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to help us in this task.

As you may be aware, the AIMS Campaigns Team relies on Volunteers to carry out its work. If you would like to collaborate with us, are looking for further information about our work, or would like to join our team, please email campaigns@aims.org.uk.