Maternity Action is the UK’s maternity rights charity dedicated to promoting, protecting, and enhancing the rights of all pregnant women, new mothers, and their families. Maternity Action was awarded a Voices from the Frontline grant by Rosa in 2023.
A key area of work for Maternity Action is campaigning for an end to NHS charges for maternity care for all pregnant women living in the UK. Every woman in the UK is entitled to NHS maternity care but this is only free for women who are ‘ordinarily resident’ in the UK or who have an exemption; for example, trafficked women or those seeking asylum. However, the rules on who gets charged are complex and it’s common for mistakes to be made by NHS Trusts which can result in vulnerable women being charged thousands – and sometimes tens of thousands – of pounds for their care. NHS charges mean that many vulnerable women avoid accessing maternity care because they are afraid of getting a huge bill that they have no hope of paying. This puts them and their babies at risk.
Maternity Action successfully applied to Rosa’s Voices from the Frontline fund for a grant to produce video content that empowered women with lived experience of the impact of NHS charges to share their stories.
Catherine Pellegrino, Senior Policy Officer at Maternity Action explains:
“We needed to bring to life the experiences of women and the impact that being charged for NHS maternity care has had on their lives. The women we’ve supported through this campaign are vulnerable but their stories are incredibly powerful. We needed to offer women the space to tell their stories in a way that protected them but that also hit home with decision makers and others who can change a system that penalises vulnerable women. The Voices from the Frontline funding from Rosa meant we could do this and super-charge our campaigning in this area, making a real difference to the lives of vulnerable women affected by NHS charging.”
The videos will also be used in a longer form to supplement training for those working in our healthcare system to help them advocate for vulnerable women accessing maternity care. Maternity Action also used its funding to run a webinar for over 70 attendees including midwives, where the videos were shown.
“Of course, we want to see an end to NHS charges for maternity care, and charging more generally, but until that happens, we need to help healthcare professionals and those in charge of NHS trusts understand how charges for maternity care put the lives of women and their babies at risk. We know that in 2023 in almost a quarter of our cases, women who are entitled to free care had been incorrectly charged – many women will be extremely vulnerable and unable to challenge the bill they have received.
“The importance of our work to support women who are incorrectly charged for NHS maternity care can’t be underestimated but it’s very labour intensive. We really need to see systems change and to do this we need senior managers in NHS trusts to pay attention when mistakes are made and to ensure lessons are learned. The videos we produced will help decision makers to better understand women’s experiences and encourage them to make changes to better protect pregnant women, new mums and their babies.
“Our campaigning work is really important and it has a real-life impact on the women we support, but too many funders won’t make grants to support campaigning – this is why we are particularly grateful to Rosa. We were very relieved that the application process for Voices from the Frontline was so easy and efficient. It was very straightforward and once we got comfortable with the idea of a video application it ended up saving us a lot of time.”