Safety Culture programme for maternity and neonatal board safety champions

Overview

The NHS England and NHS Improvement Women’s Health Policy team is currently delivering a Safety Culture programme for maternity and neonatal board safety champions. This is a bespoke, co-designed programme, involving all maternity providers across England and has been running since March 2021. This programme is delivered and supported by the Advancing Quality Alliance (Aqua), through a series of Board safety champion masterclasses, peer learning and building a community of practice throughout 2021 and 2022.

The purpose of the programme is to improve the safety and quality of care delivered to mothers and babies by enabling those with specific responsibility for safety in maternity provider units to understand the relationship between safety improvement and safety culture in order to enable change.

It is important we all help to build a supportive safety improvement network across the country and we strongly encourage those with specific responsibility for maternity safety to participate in the programme’s events and activities.

We are asking all providers to confirm the contact details of their nominated safety champions for the roles below:

• board level safety champion (executive)
• board level safety champion (non-executive directors with responsibility for maternity and neonatal services)
• midwifery safety champion
• neonatal safety champion
• obstetrics safety champion

Why your views matter

To ensure information and invitations about the programme reach the relevant contacts at your provider, we are asking if you could populate this online Maternity and neonatal board safety champions directory with contact details for the nominated roles as listed above.

Please confirm and update the contact details for your organisation by Friday 7 January at the latest and encourage your board maternity safety champions to take part in the Safety Culture programme activities planned up to March 2022. Should you have any further questions, please contact the team directly via email on nhsi.maternitysafetychampions@nhs.net

What happens next

The contact details for the nominated safety champion roles in your organisation will be used to ensure information and invitations about the Maternity and Neonatal Board Safety Champion programme are reaching the relevant contacts.