Carmarthenshire Cabinet pass Maternity and Early Years Strategy

TODAY (Jul 17), the Carmarthenshire Council Cabinet held a meeting on the maternity and early years transformation strategy for West Wales.

The purpose of the meeting gain approval for the adoption of the Maternity and Early Years Strategy for West Wales. The aim was to decide on endorsing the strategy.

Carmarthenshire County Council are working in partnership with Hywel Dda University Health Board (HDUHB), Ceredigion County Council and Pembrokeshire County Council in response to Welsh Government’s Early Years Integration Transformation Programme.

The programme focuses on the need for a ‘joined up and responsive early years’ service to ensure that every child has the best start in life’.

The Maternity and Early Years Transformation programme will require change across all services delivering maternity and early years support to families. These changes will need to be implemented both operationally and strategically.

Endorsement of the strategy is required to ensure full support of the vision and priorities and to ensure that all involved have a clear understanding of the direction of travel within the Maternity and Early Years services in the coming years.

Cllr Jane Tremlett introduced the strategy to the cabinet meeting.

Jane Tremlett said:

“The word transformation is the critical one in this. It really has changed the way we provide services. The aims of the Maternity and Early Years Transformation programme are to provide the ‘right help at the right time’ framework for services and independent services. Maternity is a new element within this.

“It is made up of a multi-disciplinary team of health professionals, midwives, health minsters, speech and language therapists and local authority professionals such as family support officers and community connectors.

“The team is led by an early years integration coordinator and the systems for the teams are developed and monitored by a performance and finance officer, of which both are Hywel Dda Healthboard employees. The maternity and antenatal care will start at naught so you’ve got care coming right at the very start for if support is needed for a child or children.”

After Jane Tremlett introduced and put forward the strategy, Cllr Glynog Davies approved of the strategy and said that it was a pleasure for him to second the programme proposed by Cllr Jane Tremlett.

He said:

“This is a very, very important plan because it does involve us in the education department. The well-being aims are talking about having a good start and that is such an important thing for us in the education department that all of our children get the best possible opportunity at the beginning of their lives.

“Those early experiences are so important to everybody. Thank you Jane for presenting that and I can make sure that we – in the education department – will be keeping an eye on the development of this plan because it is of such a great benefit. Thank you very much.”

After Glynog Davies’ comments, the cabinet voted on endorsing the programme which passed unanimously.

The full webcast can be found here: https://carmarthenshire.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcast_interactive/789982