Improving workplace culture and safety – Perinatal Culture & Leadership Programme
Health Innovation South West is supporting Trusts across the region with the Perinatal Culture & Leadership Programme to improve the quality of care delivered by perinatal teams.
Impact
- Launched MOMENTS (Meanings, Competencies, and Materials in Everyday Team Safety), a resource framework to enhance safety and culture through daily practice.
- Enabled collaboration across five Trusts to facilitate learning and promote safe and equitable care
- 54 attendees at a deterioration prevention and perinatal culture event.
Project summary
The national objective of the Perinatal Culture & Leadership Programme is to improve the quality of care delivered by perinatal teams. This is being achieved by empowering leaders to drive change with a deeper understanding of the relationship between leadership, safety improvement and safety culture.
Health Innovation South West has played a key role as a facilitator and connector across trusts and regions. We have developed a comprehensive stakeholder map and are actively engaging through regular communities of practice.
Our efforts are focussed on creating the necessary conditions within the system to share learning from local initiatives related to culture and leadership. In doing so, we are supporting clinical teams to develop psychological safety, promote civility, and nurture a just and learning-oriented workplace culture.
In the Hospital Midwife Gives Newborn Baby to a Mother to Hold, Supportive Father Lovingly Hugging Baby and Wife. Happy Family in the Modern Delivery Ward.
Rationale
Perinatal care remains under the scrutiny from ongoing inquiries. Effective leadership and a supportive culture focused on providing a psychologically safe workplace with compassion and kindness at its core is the focus of this work.
Key stakeholders
- Health Innovation South West has enabled connections across five trusts in the South West region to facilitate learning and promote safe and equitable care.
- We have connected with all three ICBs and supported trusts to provide regular updates about the progress they are making with perinatal safety culture.
Next steps
- Communities of Practice will continue as an online space for collaboration as we work to create a regional learning system to support civility and psychological safety in the workplace. Over the next 12 months, our goal is to harness local quality improvement expertise to further support clinical teams in measuring the impact of their interventions.
- Supporting the development of the Culture Coach network across the South West is a key step in maintaining engagement and shifting how clinical teams approach everyday conversations to prioritise support and safety. One of our upcoming areas of focus will be running a national Community of Practice to support Culture Coaches across the country. This space will help coaches recognise opportunities and apply techniques to improve the way we listen and relate, both to one another as professionals and to the service users we care for.
- We are planning to collaborate with Health Innovation West of England to deliver MOMENTS training in site-specific trusts that express interest in working with us. This partnership aims to support trusts in embedding compassionate, safety-focused conversations into everyday practice and to further strengthen a positive workplace culture across perinatal services.
Thank you so much for a really positive, engaging day, very much needed especially in the current environment. I got some joy for the job back today - thank you.
Attendee - Deterioration prevention and perinatal culture event
