Maternity ‘Hearing the True Voice of Women’ project wins HSJ award | News

Congratulations to Royal Surrey’s Maternity Services Team, winners of a Health Service Journal (HSJ) Patient Safety Award 2022.

The team won Maternity and Midwifery Initiative of the Year for a patient-led service development project entitled ‘Hearing the True Voice of Women’.

This innovative project looked at how the team received feedback about their service from women using it, particularly hard-to-reach groups. The team recognised that the existing channels they were using did not represent their target audience fairly.

As the team was involved in developing new maternity hubs in local communities and setting up assigned small teams of midwives to see women through pregnancy and birth, it was keen to gather feedback to further develop its services.

Led by Clare Cardu, Transformation Lead Midwife, the team explored how women’s voices could be better heard. The solution they came up with was to use a patient experience service (PEP Health) to automate collection of online feedback from social media platforms.

The PEP Health service scores patient comments and gives a dashboard flagging up positive feedback and concerns. Information that is causing confusion for women using the service can be picked up quickly via the dashboard.

The rich and diverse feedback received was particularly useful during the pandemic, highlighting women’s worries about coming into hospital for antenatal appointments, for example, which led to the setting up of drive-through routine antenatal checks and online antenatal classes. It has also helped inform the design and content of the maternity microsite.

Amy Stubbs, Deputy Director of Midwifery and Head of Nursing, Women and Children’s, said: “The ability to collect feedback from a broad range of online platforms has been invaluable, giving us a rich resource for understanding patients’ experience of our maternity services. The feedback is then shared regularly among all areas of the service and helps us to keep learning and improving.

“I’m very proud to see this successful project recognised with an HSJ Patient Safety Award. It’s a brilliant achievement.”

Maternity Services was one of three teams shortlisted in six categories of the HSJ Awards. Congratulations also go to the Radiotherapy Department, which was a finalist in the Digital System and Process Development Award and the SCReaM Team, which runs our Human Factors and Team Resource Management Programme.

The SCReaM Team was a finalist for the Patient Safety Education and Training Award, the Maternity and Midwifery Initiative of the Year Award and Harnessing a Human Factors Approach to Improve Patient Safety Award.