‘The risk of baby loss shouldn’t depend on your skin colour’

Digital innovation can help create a world where the risk of baby loss doesn’t depend on your skin colour, writes Dr Jyotsna Vohra, director of research, programmes and impact at the pregnancy and baby charity Tommy’s

Within months of his appointment as secretary of state for health and social care, Wes Streeting declared that maternity services were “one of the biggest issues that keeps me awake at night”.

“I think that what we have seen, in the case of specific trusts, are problems and risk factors that exist right across maternity services across the country,” he said.

He is right. The poor care exposed by recent enquiries into individual trusts is the result not of unique and unpredictable local circumstances, but systemic issues spanning our health services.

Digital innovation is key to achieving our vision of a world where the risk of losing your baby to stillbirth or neonatal death – or of losing your own life during pregnancy, labour or soon afterwards – is not associated with the colour of your skin or postcode.

Digital tools to drive improvement

An analysis from Tommy’s National Centre for Maternity Improvement, published in May 2025, showed for the first time that even within individual hospitals and NHS trusts, ethnicity and economic status can negatively affect pregnancy and birth outcomes.

There are, of course, complex and interconnecting factors underlying these findings, but everyone should have access to the best possible health care before, during and after pregnancy.

Even within individual hospitals and NHS trusts, ethnicity and economic status can negatively affect pregnancy and birth outcomes

This should be a right, not a privilege.

Researchers funded by or associated with Tommy’s have developed – and continue to develop – digital tools to drive improvements and reduce inequities in maternity care.

These include:

• Tommy’s Pathway Clinical Decision Support Tool: helping healthcare providers work out who is most at risk of giving birth prematurely or of developing pregnancy complications that can lead to stillbirth. The tool, piloted successfully across four sites, will now be tested at 26 NHS hospitals in England through the randomised control PARTNER.
• QUiPP app: a tool to predict spontaneous preterm birth, either in women who have no symptoms but are known to be at high risk or those who have symptoms suggesting they may go into early labour. Premature birth is the most common cause of death in children under five in the UK and every year an estimated 53,000 babies are born before 37 weeks of pregnancy.
• Tommy’s Miscarriage Support Tool: sets out questions for women and birthing people about their health and previous pregnancies and calculates their chance of a successful future pregnancy. The tool is based on an algorithm developed at Tommy’s National Centre for Miscarriage Research, with scope to achieve even more accurate predictions and personalise care further.

Crucially, none of this technology is designed to replace clinical judgement.

Rather, these tools help ensure both healthcare professionals and all pregnant women and birthing people can make decisions based on the most up-to-date evidence-based information, maximising opportunities for effective interventions and minimising the risk of harm.

A single patient record for maternity 

There is no doubt the government recognises the need to address systemic issues and the importance of embedding digital into maternity services.

As well as listing ‘analogue to digital’ as an overall priority, the NHS 10 year health plan promised that maternity care would be the first to benefit from rollout of the single patient record, which aims to allow staff across the NHS access to a patient’s history and previous care.

This would spare women having to repeat their experiences and reduce the chance of vital information being missed.

In his announcement of a national investigation into maternity services in June, Streeting also promised the rollout of a new digital system to all maternity services by November, to flag potential safety concerns in trusts and support rapid, national action.

The UK has continually missed one target after another for the reduction of stillbirths and premature births, and neonatal and maternal deaths

But all of this echoes pledges we have heard before – pledges made as the UK has continually missed one target after another for the reduction of stillbirths and premature births, and neonatal and maternal deaths.

In May this year, the annual Saving Babies’ Lives report from the Sands and Tommy’s Joint Policy Unit estimated that at least 2,500 fewer babies would have died since 2018 if the government had achieved its ambition of halving the 2010 rates of stillbirth, neonatal and maternal deaths in England.

That’s 100 primary school classrooms – empty.

New ambition to reduce stillbirth

We’re calling for new ambitions, including a stillbirth rate of no more than two per 1,000 births and a neonatal mortality rate of no more than 0.5 per 1,000 live births, with a target date of 2035, in alignment with the timeframe for the 10 year health plan. Evidence suggests this is achievable.

In Estonia, which has one of the most digitally mature healthcare systems in the world, the stillbirth rate halved from 3.6 per thousand births in 2015 to 1.8 in 2019; over the same period, the rate in Slovenia fell from 3.3 to 2.0.

It should not be unrealistic to expect that in a decade’s time, we can achieve similar outcomes in the UK.

Promises to improve maternity services and safety – including through digital technology – must now be backed by meaningful investment.