The PReCePT project has so far prevented around seven cases of cerebral palsy in the West of England, representing potential lifetime healthcare savings in the region of £5 million – and substantially more when including loss of productivity and social care costs over a lifetime.
PReCePT was developed by the West of England AHSN in collaboration with University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust, and involved both patients and staff.
This evidence-based, cost-effective project was designed to help reduce cerebral palsy in babies through the increased antenatal administration of magnesium sulphate (MgSO4) to mothers during preterm labour, costing from £1 per individual dose.
The intervention was adopted by all five maternity units in the West of England. Projection modelling indicates that since the launch of the project in August 2014, phase one of PReCePT has prevented seven cases of cerebral palsy across the region.
Between 4,000 and 5,000 babies are born before 30 weeks’ gestation in England per year and stand to benefit from full national roll-out of the PReCePT programme. Successful scaling up of PReCePT is likely to prevent several hundred cases of cerebral palsy per year, based on highest grade evidence*.
Following the successful rollout of PReCePT to all five acute trusts in the West of England in 2016, the project is now benefiting from £0.5 million in ‘Scaling Up’ funding from the Health Foundation. This will fund an evaluation to study the effectiveness of two different Quality Improvement approaches in implementing the intervention across a subset of maternity units. Read more here.
Funded by NHS England, PReCePT is also one of the seven local AHSN programmes to have been selected for adoption and spread across the national AHSN Network during 2018-2020. This work will be led by the West of England AHSN. Watch the videos and view the presentation slides from the ‘Get Ready for PReCePT’ event in May 2018 here.
This work will bring together the 15 AHSNs and the aligned drivers of the Maternal and Neonatal Health Safety Collaborative (MNHSC) and the national Patient Safety Collaboratives (PSCs) to support the aim of achieving 85% uptake of administration of magnesium sulphate to preterm babies in all maternity units in England, with a stretch target of 95% by 2020.
The toolkit can be found here.
*Crowther et al. 2017; PLoS Med 14(10): e1002398 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002398
Contact: Suzi van Es, Programme Manager Innovation Adoption & PReCePT Programme Lead. Tel. 02382 020 840
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