Improving the Safety of Maternity Services

In brief 

Evidence and practice from the UK and abroad has shown that harm in maternity services is often related to shortcomings in communication, planning or team dynamics, or a lack of standard responses to clinical information and emergency situations.

From June 2009 to December 2011, our Improving the Safety of Maternity Services programme supported four NHS maternity units to use teamwork and collaboration to improve the safety and reliability of obstetrics and midwifery. The sites involved were:

• Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Trust
• Luton and Dunstable NHS Foundation Trust
• NHS Tayside
• North Bristol NHS Trust.

Our programme partner Pascal Metrics worked closely with the participating sites to help them develop exceptional clinical leadership skills, effective teamwork and collaboration practices and unit-level improvement capabilities. We provided funding to each organisation to help towards the costs of releasing staff time for programme activities, short-term start-up for new posts, and education and training activities.

Over the course of the programme, each of the participating sites achieved significant cultural changes and successfully developed the improvement skills of their leadership teams.