Enhancing Experience in the Maternity Unit

Enhancement of the experience of women and families during maternity care using real time feedback and postal surveys and provision of targeted support to women experiencing traumatic birth using real time birth reflections

Project lead: Ms Ruth James (South Tees NHS Foundation Trust)

Women will receive targeted, timely and effective support to reduce the long term effects of birth trauma through development of a Birth Reflection Pathway. Key community midwives have received training and are conducting a pilot in collaboration with the Pregnancy Birth and beyond sessions and local Health visiting teams. This will allow the midwives to receive feedback and signpost those that require further support and thematic analysis of women’s experiences for further learning and improvements within maternity services.

The processes for collection of face- to-face, real-time feedback from women has been enhanced in collaboration with Northumbria and the Corporate patient experience team resulting in a revised audit tool in line with the ‘1000 voices’ concept devised by Northumbria. This has been successfully implemented also involving all managers within the clinical areas providing real time relational and transactional feedback, domain scores are calculated and used to identify areas for targeted improvement and allowing celebration of good practice.

The Corporate patient experience team are supporting us to survey 5500 women 3 months post-delivery using a postal survey to reflect their whole maternity pathway experience. Survey responses will be scored to allow trending and to identify areas for targeted improvement.

In conjunction with the CCG and their little one pilot we will engage to enable women to record a diary for each episode of care. The aim is for the app to be functional by the end of the year and an approach to interpreting and theming the diary entries will be developed.

Real time electronic feedback display boards have been implemented throughout maternity services to provide timely, effective and meaningful communication on the feedback received (you said, we did) to all women and families attending Maternity Services.