Patient Safety Minister Says Target for Reducing Premature Birth Rate Will Not Be Met
The Minister of Women’s Health has admitted there is no chance the government will meet its target of reducing the preterm birth rate to 6% by 2025.
Premature birth – when a baby is born before 37 weeks of pregnancy – is the biggest killer of children under five in the UK. The previous government set a target in 2019 to reduce the percentage of premature births to 6% in 2025.
But Gillian Merron, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Patient Safety, Women’s Health and Mental Health, admitted that “this ambition will not be achieved” when she gave evidence to parliament. In 2022, 7.9% of babies In England, premature births were reported. It is estimated that 53,000 babies are born prematurely in the UK each year.
In fact, officials told the Lords research into premature birththat the number of preterm births was increasing. Prof Donald Peebles, national clinical director for maternity, said the number of preterm births for all pregnancies was falling, “not as quickly as we would have liked, but up until about 2020”, but that it had “clearly increased” since then.
“Our best evidence would be that it has gone up a little bit again this year. So there is no way we would get that ambition from 8% to 6%.”
The NHS is likely to change its target for premature births, it was also revealed. Lady Merron told the House of Lords she wanted to look at whether the targets needed to be changed. “I understand that (the 6% target) has provided a focus, but a focus is not what we need, we need to actually achieve it,” she said.
“There are of course circumstances where preterm birth is the right thing to do, and it feels a bit like a blunt instrument of measurement,” she added. “So as we look at what our next ambition is, I’m very keen to make sure it’s a more sensitive ambition to reality.”
Admission follows a joint report in May by baby loss charities Sands and Tommy’s, which concluded that the government was also off track with its target of halving stillbirths, neonatal deaths and maternal mortality by 2025. They calculated that around 1,000 lives a year could have been saved since 2018 if the ambitions had been met.
Dr Jyotsna Vohra, Director of Research, Programmes and Impact at Tommy’s, said: “There has been an unacceptable decline in maternal safety in recent years, which is detrimental to women and babies. Addressing preterm birth must now be a priority to save lives and prevent the life-changing health complications that can follow.”