Collaborating for better perinatal care in the South West

Perinatal practitioners and service users from across the region have come together to share learning on preventing patient deterioration and improving workplace culture.

Hosted by Health Innovation South West in our Event and Innovation Space on 31 March, the event drew on the PIER approach (‘prevention, identification, escalation and response’) to prevent maternal and infant deterioration across the Peninsula from a whole system perspective.

Across the UK, there is a clear and growing focus on improving safety in maternity and neonatal care, with national programmes led by NHS England placing increasing emphasis on early recognition of deterioration, effective escalation, and strengthening the voice of families.

The PIER event built on this momentum, creating space for teams across the region to come together around a shared purpose, connecting programmes, people and practical approaches to make care safer. Participants were able to collaboratively explore challenges in perinatal care and discuss how to improve outcomes for mothers and babies based on what was working in their own clinical practice.

The role of service users and their families

Birthing people and their families are partners in determining their own care, with their voices able to bring about positive changes when working in tandem with clinicians.

It’s been really good to network with clinicians and healthcare providers to impress upon everyone the importance of patient voice, listening to the service users who actually use the services, gaining feedback from them, and then making positive decisions to improve care for all.

Lara Grigg, Senior Lead for Devon’s Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnership (MNVP) in Devon

 

Image: The Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnership’s stand in the Innovator Marketplace

Real-life case studies

From implementing patient safety tools such as the Neonatal Early Warning Track and Trigger tool (NEWTT2) and the Maternity Early Warning Score (MEWS), to applying Martha’s Rule in a perinatal setting, participants heard valuable insights from other NHS trusts and shared learning.

We’ve recently implemented it [MEWS] digitally in Royal Devon University Hospitals NHS Trust, ensuring that escalation’s done early so that there’s less risk of deterioration. We’re also going to be working on our NEWTT 2 implementation, which is about deterioration in the newborn, to provide early escalation for those babies that are some of our most vulnerable patients.

Hazel Duckworth, Transformation Midwife at the Royal Devon University Healthcare Foundation Trust

 

Image: Participants gathered in the Amphitheatre for the start of the presentations

Innovative products and solutions

Companies with innovations and products for maternity services also had stalls in our Innovation Marketplace. Those exhibiting included Medtronic, MoM Incubators, Health and Care Innovations (HCI), Baby Bank Network, along with project leads from the Antenatal Preventative Pelvic Floor Exercises and Localisation (APPEAL) and Devon’s Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnership.  The solutions ranged from technology to track vital signs and equipment to keep babies warm, to educational videos to help women with a variety of medical conditions.

The event’s been well worthwhile today, particularly in terms of networking… Just exploring possibilities and opportunities around the ways in which the market is evolving and developing under the Ten Year Plan.

Richard Wyatt Haynes, Founding Director of Health and Care Innovations (HCI)

 

Image: Innovators discussing their solutions for perinatal care with healthcare staff in the Innovation Marketplace

Using QI and the impact of language on workplace culture and clinical escalation

Embedding and sustaining an improvement culture is crucial for patient safety, where healthcare staff feel supported to raise improvement ideas in an environment that promotes agency for change and where staff therefore feel engaged in the process.

The PIER event brought real alignment between the Avoiding Brain Injury in Childbirth (ABC), Martha’s Rule, and deterioration prevention programmes. The day was grounded in powerful lessons shared by our Maternity and Neonatal Voice Partnership representatives, keeping us connected to our purpose, to serve the families who depend on our teams. The programme deepened our understanding of how these initiatives contribute to safer care, from recognising deterioration early to ensuring families’ voices are heard. Through quality improvement, and a focus on curiosity and language, teams left with renewed clarity and energy to make maternity and newborn care safer across the region.

Fergal O‘Malley, Clinical Associate in Perinatal Patient Safety at Health Innovation South West and Advanced Neonatal Nurse Practitioner at Royal Cornwall NHS Hospitals Trust

“Our PIER in-person event really strengthened system-level collaboration across the region, bringing together trust teams with LMNS and MNVP representatives to share learning and accelerate improvement for families. The ABC intrapartum foetal deterioration workshop provided a practical taster of what we will be rolling out later this year, and we were able to share insights from the region’s Martha’s Rule MatNeo.

Jen Garner, Programme Manager at Health Innovation South West and Midwife

 

Find out more about our work on our Patient Safety and Martha’s Rule webpages. If you have any questions, please email Fergal O’Malley or Jen Garner.