Guide resource
In January and February 2025, we embarked on an ambitious plan to facilitate and host three maternity and neonatal events across the North region, these took place in the North East, Yorkshire and the North West. All were hosted at member trust’s and supported by the panel firms across the North region. The events were well attended with a range of people attending from member trusts, integrated care boards, panel firms and organisations such as NHSE (NHS England), MNSI (Maternity and Newborn Safety Investigations), YHIA (Yorkshire and Humber Improvement Academy), AQUA and Health Innovation.
The aim of the events was to create a networking and learning experience which included the voices of maternity and neonates from all perspectives, and this was done through a variety of presentations, scenario discussion and workshop activities. We utilised mentimeter to create a psychologically safe space to share thoughts on culture and the workshops focused thoughts from the perspective of how a student might describe the culture of a maternity or neonatal unit, how people feel about speaking up and why they might not, what data can be triangulated to lead and support improvement and what qualities are needed in a leader and the barriers to why leaders might not have them. The mentimeter and workshop responses are informing further work with NHSE and YHIA to support a future event and training sessions for culture coaches as part of the Perinatal Culture and Leadership programme.
The feedback from the events was overwhelmingly positive with 93% of attendees grading the events and agendas as good or excellent with the patient perspective session as the clear favourite. This was a session led by a maternity and neonatal voices partnership lead and used lived experiences, including their own in some sessions, to share how clinicians can improve care. This created some thought provoking, emotional and very informative takeaways for the day.
Since the events, we have continued to support maternity and neonatal units through bespoke sessions such as informed consent, duty of candour and record keeping; through benchmarking work and scorecard analysis. The 2025 scorecard has just been released and the networking and connections made are continuing to be built upon to support member trusts to learn from claims and to support continuous improvement across maternity and neonatal units.
Overall, these were fantastic events which are still creating, informing and lending themselves to new and existing workstreams across the North region.
Access the presentation slides and materials below:
- North East presentation slides
- North East workshop responses
- Yorkshire presentation slides
- Yorkshire workshop responses
- North West presentation slides
- North West workshop responses
Highlights from the event
