The Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services (AIMS) is a volunteer-run charity. Trustees and helpline volunteers are required to be lay people, but our membership and active volunteers include many midwives and other medical professionals, whose input is greatly valued. Our candle image, which has been the AIMS' logo since the late 1960s, represents our commitment to change, no matter how large or small changes may be: ‘It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness’.
The charity was founded over 60 years ago by Sally Willington ‘to support women and families to achieve the birth that they wanted’. Since then, we have campaigned tirelessly for improvements to the UK's maternity services, as well as supporting individual maternity service users, their families and all those who support them. Our dual objectives are reflected in our mission statement:
‘We support all maternity service users to navigate the system as it exists, and campaign for a system which truly meets the needs of all.’
The ‘all’ means that though our primary focus is maternity service users, we also want a service that meets the needs of their partners, families, midwives, doctors, doulas, antenatal educators and society as a whole.
We see the role of midwives as key in delivering a truly responsive, person-centred maternity service. This is why a major part of our campaigning work is focused on the delivery of the Better Births agenda and, in particular, on campaigning for continuity of carer schemes which work for both midwives and maternity service users.
Our campaigning work also includes responding to consultations (for example, on National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines), participating in stakeholder groups (such as the National Maternity Transformation Programme Stakeholder Council), providing critical scrutiny of maternity services policy, raising awareness and lobbying on key issues.
The ‘support’ side includes individual support from our knowledgeable and experienced helpline volunteers (helpline@ aims.org.uk or call 0300 365 0663) and providing evidence-based information on our Birth Information webpages (www.aims.org.uk/information), in the AIMS Journal (www.aims.org.uk/journal) and our books (www.aims.org.uk/shop).
Our Birth Information pages include a wide range of topics, and many have been written for us by external specialists. A team of volunteers ensures that existing pages are reviewed and updated as necessary, and commissions pages on additional topics. The AIMS Journal is a quarterly online, open-access publication. It includes a wide range of articles designed primarily for birth workers and campaigners, though we hope they are also accessible to maternity service users. As well as themed articles, it includes updates on the AIMS' campaigns activities, interviews with key players in the birth world, birth stories, conference reports and book reviews. Our latest issue focused on the concept of ‘Salutogenesis’—which by looking at health from the perspective of holistic wellbeing rather than from a pathogenic perspective as ‘the absence of disease’ offers us another way of thinking about how to make things better. You can find this latest issue and many previous issues on our website or on the ISSUU platform (https://issuu.com/aims1/docs).
The AIMS has been publishing widely respected books for many years, and last year we launched our new AIMS Guide To… series. Titles so far are Resolution After Birth, Induction Of Labour, Your Rights In Pregnancy And Birth, Twin Pregnancy And Birth, and Safety In Childbirth. All of these are available from our online shop www.aims.org.uk/shop along with previous publications, and more AIMS Guides are planned.
All the AIMS information resources go through our peer-review process. This approach, drawing on the knowledge and insight of both expert and lay readers, ensures that the AIMS' resources meet the needs of our main audience, the individual maternity service user, as well as providing valuable information to those who support them.
All of this work has continued alongside our response to the pandemic. The arrival of coronavirus led to a massive increase in calls to the helpline from people confused and anxious about the changes in maternity services. The AIMS responded by quickly putting together a new Birth Information webpage, ‘Coronavirus and your maternity care’, which we've been keeping up to date as the situation changes. It includes details of the latest guidance across all four nations of the UK, and the AIMS interpretation of what that should mean for maternity service users.
The AIMS recognises that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is placing an extraordinary burden on the NHS and its staff. We pay tribute to all staff, who we know are being put under great strain by having to work in the most difficult of circumstances, as they work to ensure that the maternity services continue to offer support to all service users, their families and supporters, in line with the Better Births vision.
During the pandemic, the AIMS has made a particular effort to ensure that we have focussed our campaigning on what we believe will help achieve Better Births compliant maternity services. We have been working to raise awareness and to lobby those organisations with influence to create change to recognise the needs of both parents and of their babies.
A key strand of our work has focussed on how the maternity services, especially at the local level, are able to maintain trust with service users, to ensure that the inevitable extra stresses of the pandemic – during pregnancy, labour and birth, and the postnatal period – are minimised.
Throughout the pandemic, the AIMS has been campaigning for the needs of maternity service users to be recognised and for NHS trusts/boards to ensure that any restrictions they impose are a proportionate response to the pandemic situation. The AIMS has argued that changes in maternity services should only be implemented after a full-risk assessment, and that these risk assessments should be available for public scrutiny. We have also argued that these risk assessments must take full account of the possible impact of restrictions on service users, including clinical outcomes and the physical and mental wellbeing of service users and their families. In this context, we have called for more sharing of good practice across trusts, noting that trusts in some areas seem to be taking a proactive and creative approach to addressing problems, rather than assuming that service restrictions are inevitable.
Table 1. How to get involved
I hope you'll agree that we are doing a lot towards achieving our mission, but our resources are limited, and we'd like to do more. If you are interested in helping us, there are lots of ways to get involved:
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Similarly, the AIMS has argued for an improvement in the arrangements for access to current information about local service provision. In such uncertain times, the AIMS believes that easy access to such information can work powerfully to increase trust between providers and service users. There are many steps that trusts can take to improve practice in this area, and we are pleased to see that good practice is now being shared.