Improving maternity and neonatal care

We want to provide great care for everyone using our maternity and neonatal services.

Our teams have been involving families, listening to and acting on feedback, and working together to make significant improvements to the safety and compassion of the service.

We apologise unreservedly for the failings identified in Dr Kirkup’s report Reading the signals and we are committed to continuing to use these lessons to keep improving. You can read more about Dr Kirkup’s report on our Transforming our Trust page.

We have a Maternity and Neonatal Improvement Programme, developed with staff, and people who use our services, which is focussed on improvements linked to the themes in the report, such as providing safe services, listening to families, team work and providing compassionate care. Families and people involved in maternity and neonatal care within and outside the Trust are involved in this ongoing work.

Over recent years, we have seen improvements in the safety of the care we provide and in outcomes for women and babies. You can see how east Kent compares in our two year on report.

Listening and responding to feedback

One of the biggest changes we have made is how we listen to, and respond, to people using our service throughout their journey with us.

We have introduced Walk the patch, regularly walking around the units to listen to women and birthing people and directly hear about and act on their experiences of maternity care, and introduced the Leave your troubles at our door initiative giving women and birthing people in hospital direct access to a senior member of the midwifery team, as someone to speak to if they wish to talk about their care.

We have also introduced Your Voice is Heard, where everyone who gives birth, and their birthing partner, is offered a telephone call 6 weeks after the delivery of their baby so we can discuss and act on their experience as well as passing on all feedback to staff.

Changes have included better facilities for birthing partners, more pain relief options and reinstating home visits on the first day home from hospital. We have also reopened the Midwife-led Unit at William Harvey Hospital, offering more choice of place of birth. 

We have been working with families involved in the Reading the Signals, who provide challenge and oversight of the work we are doing.

Improving safety

To improve the quality and safety of care we have invested to increase the numbers of midwives and doctors, including specialist roles.

Medical staff have developed and trained 200 midwives in enhanced maternity care, allowing patients who need enhanced care to remain on the labour ward with their babies in dedicated enhanced maternity care rooms at both William Harvey Hospital and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital.

Doctors have reviewed and updated all clinical guidelines to improve safety.

In our maternity triage service women are assessed promptly on arrival, the aim is within 15 minutes, and given a clinical priority so that people with the most urgent need(s) are treated first.

In Maternity we have 5 different ways to share learning, including daily “safety” huddles, bulletins and forums for staff, and access to members of the Trust Board dedicated maternity safety champions.

We are also working hard to improve the environment in our maternity and neonatal units.

We were one of the first Trusts to introduce Martha’s rule, which gives patients, families, carers and staff round-the-clock access to a rapid review from a separate care team if they are worried about a person’s condition.

We have introduced the national Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF), a new way to respond to incidents which puts the focus on learning, improvement, listening to and involving patients or families.

Providing compassionate care

We have worked with families and the Saving Babies Lives charity (SANDS) to improve and increase the emotional and practical support available 7 days a week to families who have tragically experienced baby death or severe injury or illness.

Our specialist bereavement suites provide privacy so that women, babies and their families can be cared for in a more considerate and suitable setting, away from the labour wards.

We have adopted ‘Civility Saves Lives’, a national project aimed at promoting kindness and respect within teams, which is shown to have a positive impact on patient safety.

Improving team work

Our Maternity and Child Health Teams, made up of professionals from different backgrounds, have been using the national Culture and Leadership Programme, to improve how they work together. Trusts who have used this programme have seen a big impact on the quality of care they provide.

We now use this programme across our whole Trust. We started by getting widespread feedback from staff, which showed we need to: amplify the voices of our patients and staff, have a vision everyone can be part of, be somewhere everyone feels valued and have compassionate, inclusive and collective leadership.

Staff at all levels are working together to improve these areas, for example, through training for leaders, a set of behaviours everyone lives by and by introducing a staff council.

We hold a number of events bringing together people who use maternity and neonatal services, a wide range of staff from different clinical backgrounds who work in it, the Medway Local Maternity and Neonatal Service, Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnership and members of NHS England’s regional maternity team so everyone continues to be involved in our improvement work.

If you would like to get involved, please contact our Patient Voice and Involvement Team at ekhuft.patientvoice@nhs.net.

If you have used our maternity or neonatology services, or any of the services we provide, and have questions or concerns about your care, please contact us via our PALS team, by phone on 01227 783145 or via email at ekh-tr.pals@nhs.net.