Maternity safety champions

We are reviewing and updating these webpages to reflect the current work of the maternity and neonatal programme.

Guidance and support for maternity safety champions.

Useful resources

Maternity safety champions work at every level – trust, regional and national – and across regional, organisational and service boundaries .

They develop strong partnerships, can promote the professional cultures needed to deliver better care, and play a central role in ensuring that mothers and babies continue to receive the safest care possible by adopting best practice.

This webpage includes a number of resources to assist maternity safety champions and services in delivering best practice.

To ensure we always hold up-to-date information, should your maternity safety champion change, please update us by sending your new named contacts to england.perinatalcultureleadership@nhs.net.

A guide to support maternity safety champions

This guide for champions at the frontline, trust board and regional levels outlines broad role descriptions and responsibilities, and suggests activities to promote best practice – recognising that these will develop. It also signposts existing safety initiatives and improvements that can offer support.

Maternity and neonatal safety champions toolkit

This toolkit provides information and resources that will help you in your role as a safety champion to develop strong partnerships, promote positive professional cultures, and support the delivery of the safest care possible through best practice.

Maternity self-assessment tool

Launched in April 2018, the Maternity Safety Support Programme (MSSP) aims to help maternity services achieve sustained improvement across the five CQC domains – ie are services safe, effective, caring, responsive to people’s needs, and well-led?

Emerging themes were identified among services on the MSSP, and in areas the CQC rated as ‘Outstanding’ in other maternity services across England.

From these, the MSSP team developed a self-assesment tool to enable maternity services to benchmark themselves against what ‘Good’ and ‘Outstanding’ services look like.

Underpinned by a philosophy of promoting a positive leadership and safety culture, the tool also enables trusts to identify any service gaps which can be targeted in their work towards achieving improved ratings in future CQC inspections.

This will be a valuable tool to support maternity services to identify areas for improvement by benchmarking themselves against good and outstanding services.

Sharing best practice, understanding where care could be improved, and promoting honest conversations about quality are all key to fostering an open culture which prioritises safety and transparency; and we welcome any resource which supports providers to achieve this.

Nigel Acheson MD FRCOG CG(Affiliated) SFFLM, Deputy chief inspector of hospitals and responsible officer, Care Quality Commission

  • Maternity services self-assessment tool – Organisations can use this tool to inform the trust’s maternity quality improvement and safety plan, and so keep the trust board and commissioners aware of their ‘benchmarked’ position.
Please note: the tool has no formal status – ie it does not constitute a piece of evidence to put towards formal reviews or inspections. Rather, it is intended as a guide to assist in preparation for such visits.

A parent’s view: my challenge to board-level maternity safety champions.

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