Day-to-day a multidisciplinary team (MDT) , working within their individual specialities to care for a preterm baby, are familiar with working in collaboration together. However, it is only in more recent years, when the benefits of and focus on perinatal optimisation have come to the fore, that the need for the neonatal team to collaborate and engage actively with the obstetric and maternity teams has been emphasised.

In the United Kingdom the British Association of Perinatal Medicine (BAPM) develop frameworks for practice and one of their more recent quality resources outlines their ‘Perinatal Optimisation Care Pathway’ (figure 1). BAPM has recognised that in order to successfully deliver this pathway there must be a “strong teamworking culture, high quality communication habits and pursuit of common goals within perinatal teams” [4] and that the interventions described in the perinatal optimisation pathway are “undertaken within a favourable quality context where the structure and processes support an optimal environment for delivering quality improvement” [4].   

When perinatal teams work well together, they can provide a range of interventions throughout the antenatal, intrapartum and neonatal period to improve preterm outcomes. Key interventions such as antenatal steroids and magnesium sulphate, delayed cord clamping and making sure baby gets breast milk early are just some of the ways that a perinatal team can collaborate to give a preterm infant and their family the best chance of a good outcome. In situations such as neonatal resuscitation where the need to help baby breathe can often be unanticipated, effective teamwork is essential as many tasks need to be coordinated during this event [3]. Guidelines that govern newborn resuscitation globally, such as the Neonatal Resuscitation Program (NRP) regulated by the American Academy of Paediatrics [5] and the Neonatal Life Support (NLS) course regulated by the Resuscitation Council UK [6], have increasingly emphasised the importance of teamwork, recognising that teamwork has an impact on the effectiveness of neonatal resuscitation and that the outcomes of a baby after resuscitation have been shown to be more positive when the perinatal team demonstrate collaboration and good teamwork [7].