Hospital trust awarded £50,000 to improve maternity services feedback

Hospital trust awarded £50,000 to improve maternity services feedback 

Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust has been awarded £50,000 by NHS England to explore innovative ways to use women’s and their partners’ feedback to improve maternity services.

A judging panel from NHS England and the Department of Health selected the Trust as one of three winners from almost 50 applications for support from the Maternity Challenge Fund, which was set up last year to encourage new approaches to using feedback to drive improvement in the experiences of women and their families while they are receiving maternity care.

Trusts were invited to apply for funding set up to support further advances in this area, linked to the overarching ambitions of Better Births.

As well as Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust, other winning trusts are Gloucester Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.

The emphasis for this second round is on projects that continue to focus on service improvement but also address one of the following areas of potential use for patient feedback in any service:

• Making the best use of feedback given about individual clinicians or other named staff, for example, how the Friends and Family Test or other tools for gathering patient feedback could potentially contribute to such things as revalidation of clinicians, staff recognition schemes or individual staff performance management processes.
• Exploring the potential to attribute feedback to named patients where they choose to identify themselves, in pursuit of improving their individual care or finding out more about areas of concern.

Ted Adams, Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist at Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust, said: “Many large organisations use customer feedback to improve what they do and we’re no different. We want to use modern ways of asking our patients what they think about our care so that we can speed up our response to our patients. We must also support our staff to use the feedback they receive positively.”

Kath Evans, NHS England’s Maternity Experience of Care Lead, said: “This year’s Maternity Challenge Fund projects provide a real opportunity to explore how we can get even more value from the feedback that women and their partners give. These initiatives will explore whether, and how well, information about their experiences can be used to enhance what happens at an individual level.

“Each of these pieces of work has the potential to identify really innovative approaches that could benefit maternity services and families across the country and we’re delighted to be able to support the three trusts in putting their great ideas into practice.”

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