NHS England
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Second round of funding aims to improve maternity services through patient feedback
Maternity services have yesterday been invited to put forward proposals on innovative ways of using patient feedback to improve services and the winning entries could receive up to £50,000 to help get their project up and running.
Maternity Challenge Fund’s second round projects will continue to look at ways to improve maternity services through patient feedback but will explore how individual feedback can be best used.
Successful applicants will address one of the following:
- Investigate ways to make the best use of feedback given about any individually named member of staff. For example, how this could be used in staff recognition schemes or staff performance management processes.
- Examine the potential in attributing feedback to named patients, including the design of an appropriate consent model. Patient feedback could be used to provide more personalised care ensuring individual needs are met and helping to improve overall patient experience.
Evidence shows that good patient experience is associated with improved patient outcomes. The Fund aims to explore innovative ways to make better use of patient insight to deliver improved services; finding new ways to use the feedback that trusts are already collecting to generate change and add value for patients.
Earlier this year, maternity providers and CCGs were given the opportunity to bid for money from the first round of the Challenge Fund to trial new ways of working to further improve patient experience. The winning entries included:
- University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay – The project is taking a radical approach to addressing negative patient experience and to help develop a cultural change in communication across maternity teams. Through using patient feedback and involvement of families, real stories and experiences, this project is developing a training video describing how communication impacts upon service users.
- Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust – ‘Nobody’s patient’, seriously ill women and babies falling through the gaps – The project focuses on the experiences of seriously ill women and their babies, who often fall through gaps in services. As an extension of #MatExp, a new toolkit is being developed to explore collection and use of feedback from groups which often go unheard. These include families with babies in neo-natal units and women who miscarry in the second trimester.
The Maternity Challenge Fund supports the National Maternity Review which set out wide-ranging proposals to make care safer, kinder and more personalised for women and their babies.
The closing date for applications for funding from the Maternity Challenge Fund is 12 pm on 11 November 2016.
Full application information is on our website. Please send any queries to the Insight and Feedback Team at England.Insight-Queries@nhs.net.
