A new report from NHS Providers, Bold action: tackling inequalities in maternity care, calling on the government to support NHS trust leaders in their ongoing efforts to improve the quality and safety of maternity services across England.

This report highlights the consequences of rising healthcare demand and reduced resources to support this, and the knock-on effect of deep-rooted problems in access and equality elsewhere in the health system. For example, black women are up to three times more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth than white women.

This follows the announcement that future maternity improvement funding is to be cut, and trust leaders have set out their next steps for maternity services.

These include ensuring that maternity services are adequately resourced to enable trusts to implement long-term, strategic improvements and targeted interventions to reduce inequalities, national prioritisation and support for trusts to tackle structural racism and unconscious bias, and the push for targeted funding in areas of high inequalities, as well as ensuring that all national, regional and local policies on maternity services involve women.

Isabel Lawicka, director of policy and strategy at NHS Providers, said: "Whilst most women have positive birth experiences and good outcomes, far too many women have deeply distressing experiences that end in preventable tragedies.

"Improving maternity services is a vital step toward fixing our wider health system and provides a litmus test for addressing system-wide inequalities.

"When we get maternity care right, we improve health outcomes for everyone. Trust leaders have laid out clearly what support is needed to produce real and tangible changes. Frontline staff have been working round the clock to improve services but its clear that more support and prioritisation is needed from government and national bodies through increased investment and resources as well as through standardised, national approaches that can hep reduce variation in care."