Our story: Revolutionising Maternity Care Continuity
Discover the foundational insight that led to MaternityLink and our commitment to bridging critical gaps in maternal healthcare for every woman.
Why MaternityLink exists
MaternityLink was developed from direct exposure to fragmentation within maternity care pathways, where critical clinical information is often lost during transitions between providers. The failure in maternity care is not usually within individual services; it occurs between them. Our founding insight is that maternity care is delivered across multiple independent systems, including hospitals, GP practices, community midwifery teams, urgent care services, and private providers. As women move between these services, continuity of clinical information is not consistently maintained. This creates fragmentation across the maternity pathway, where:
- clinical history may not follow the patient across settings
- concerns raised in one service may not remain visible in another
- providers often operate with only partial context of the patient’s journey
These gaps become most visible during escalation, urgent assessment, and transitions of care.
The Founder's Personal Journey
During my second pregnancy, I was in temporary accommodation. Every time I moved — and I moved often — my maternity care reset. New midwife. New hospital. New GP. Every time, I had to explain everything from the beginning.
Then I developed high blood pressure. I went into triage four or five times. Each time, I had to repeat my full story from scratch. Each time, my previous concerns hadn’t been registered. Different doctors gave me different medications because nobody had the complete picture.
When I was finally discharged, the information I received was vague. Just take it. That was it. At my six week appointment, my GP had no idea any of it had happened. No discharge notes. No record of the admissions or the medications. I had to tell her myself.I am a clinical scientist. I had the language, the knowledge, and the confidence to advocate for myself. And it still wasn’t enough.
I think about the women who don’t have that. The ones whose concerns are dismissed because they aren’t documented. The ones who become the statistics we cite in reports and forget about until the next inquiry.
Black women in the UK are twice as likely to die in childbirth than white women. That number has not meaningfully changed in decades. Behind it is a system that repeatedly fails to know who a woman is, what she has been through, and what she has already raised as a concern.MaternityLink exists because I lived the gap. This is not a startup story. This is a survival story. And I am building the infrastructure so that no woman has to tell it again.
Priscilla Addai
Founder, MaternityLink
Clinical Scientist | BSc First Class, University of Bradford | Medical Training, Lancaster University
What sets us apart
Most maternity support services available to employees in the UK focus on wellbeing, coaching, counselling, education, or access to additional healthcare services. While these services can provide valuable support, they generally operate separately from the clinical systems involved in maternity care.
MaternityLink addresses a different problem. It is designed to improve continuity of clinical information across the healthcare providers involved in a woman’s maternity journey, including NHS, private, and employer-funded care settings. Rather than functioning as a standalone wellbeing benefit, MaternityLink operates as a continuity infrastructure layer that supports:
- cross-provider visibility of maternity-related clinical information
- continuity during transitions between services
- structured documentation of concerns and clinical history
- improved access to longitudinal maternity context across care settings
This means employers are not only providing additional support, but a fundamental improvement to the care pathway.
This means employers are not only providing additional support services, but contributing to a more coordinated maternity care experience across providers.
MaternityLink is therefore positioned differently from traditional maternity wellbeing platforms, employee assistance programmes, or private healthcare subscriptions.
Its focus is continuity of care infrastructure, not standalone support delivery.
“A system that doesn’t know a woman can’t care for her.”
Dr Jacqueline Bamfo, Consultant Obstetrician, Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust