Friends, Families and Travellers (FFT) has raised serious concerns that National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation’s (NMNI) report, by NMNI Chair Baroness Amos, into maternity and neonatal services, fails to mention Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities anywhere in its findings. This is despite FFT’s extensive contribution to the investigation’s evidence base.
Over the past two years, FFT and the Roma Support Group worked closely with the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) to:
- Make the investigation’s Call for Evidence (CfE) accessible so that Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people could access and meaningfully engage with the CfE.
- Run evidence panels for exclusively Gypsy, Roma and Traveller, so that people could share their experiences, which were often traumatic, in a safe environment.
- Support the investigation to engage with more than 35 Gypsy, Roma and Traveller, whose experiences should have informed the final report.
Along with the above, two lived experience experts gave evidence directly to the Chair of the investigation, Baroness Amos. As part of work in the Cabinet Office’s Race Equality Engagement Group, FFT CEO Sarah Mann also raised these experiences directly with the NMNI team.
The 100+ members of Maternity Collective, which FFT is part of, also submitted an evidence-based plan to the investigation.
Despite this depth of engagement across multiple tiers and with a wide range of stakeholders, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities have once again been consciously cast aside from the evidence, research and recommendations needed to drive critical change.
Census data has shown that people from Gypsy and Traveller communities are 1.5 times more likely to experience the death of a child, and a recent systematic review confirmed the disproportionately poor perinatal outcomes experienced by Gypsy, Roma and Traveller women. Yet the report’s own supplementary data evidence fails to make even a single mention.
The report’s call for better ethnicity data collection and its Modern Service Framework accountability measures for Black and Asian women and birthing people, both exclude inclusion health groups.
This is despite Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people’s inclusion under NHS England’s own Core20PLUS5, due to the enduring inequalities and poor health outcomes experienced, and overall exclusion from key data sets.
FFT is calling on DHSC to publish a follow-up report that:
- Extends Modern Service Framework accountability measures to include Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.
- Aligns ethnicity data collection with 2021 Census categories, at a minimum, with a long-term roadmap towards full data disaggregation in recognition of the separate ethnic groups of Romany Gypsy, Roma, and Irish Traveller.
- Explicitly names Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities within Core20PLUS5’s use in maternity and neonatal care.
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