Partnership to improve maternity care for under-served South Yorkshire communities
A new partnership between South Yorkshire’s Community Foundation (SYCF) and NHS South Yorkshire is set to help improve maternity and neonatal care experiences for women and families across the region.
The collaboration, supported through the NHS Maternity Care Research Small Grants Programme, aims to ensure voices from communities with the poorest maternity outcomes are heard and embedded into future service design.
Through the programme, SYCF will work with grassroots community organisations across Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield to gather lived experiences from women who have used maternity and neonatal services within the last three years.
It will focus on engaging families from communities which often face barriers to good maternity outcomes, including young parents, people living in high-deprivation areas, Somali families, Romanian communities, and Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.
Parents with complex medical conditions, such as diabetes or epilepsy, will also be a key focus for the NHS South Yorkshire’s Local Maternity and Neonatal System (LMNS) project.
Ceris Harrison, Project Coordinator - Maternity Transformation, for NHS South Yorkshire, said:
We know that some women in South Yorkshire continue to face inequalities in maternity care and we are committed to changing that. To design services that truly work for everyone, we need to listen to the communities who are least heard.
This partnership with SYCF will help us gather honest, meaningful feedback so that maternity care in South Yorkshire can be co-designed with the people who use it.
Community organisations selected through the grant programme will begin engagement work in January 2026. Their findings will be shared at a major regional listening event on 28 April at Gulliver’s Valley, in Rotherham, before being used to shape NHS South Yorkshire’s new involvement strategy.
Jess O’Neill, grants and partnerships manager at SYCF, said:
We are proud to be supporting this vital piece of research and community engagement. With almost 40 years of experience engaging with local communities, we are uniquely placed to gather the real stories that often go unheard.
By working together with the NHS, we can ensure these voices lead to tangible improvements in maternity care for families across South Yorkshire.
More than £35,000 is available through the fund to support organisations with staffing costs, volunteer time, engagement activities and essential resources.
Organisations will also receive guidance from the LMNS team on what information to gather and how best to present findings.
SYCF and NHS South Yorkshire will continue working with participating groups after April’s listening event to feedback how community insights are shaping the new maternity strategy.
Meet Jess
Jess works Tuesdays - Fridays every week and oversees all of the grant programmes, so is able to help with specific and general queries about our programmes, our application systems and processes.
She also oversees our panels and our many volunteers that lead on our decision making for many of our funds.
Jess holds a weekly Teams drop-in sessions as an opportunity to chat to groups about any questions they may have, or assistance with our application system. These are held most Wednesdays 4pm - 5pm. The link to these meetings can be found on our Apply page.
Jess O'Neill
Grants and Partnerships Manager
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