UK MUM Awards 2025
Celebrating excellence in maternity and neonatal care
Hywel Dda University Health Board
Nominated by Tipswalo Day
Winning Categories:
- National Winner
Promoting Collaboration and Teamworking
- Achieving Excellence Through Service Improvements
One staff member told us: ‘I feel safe to report incidents and supported to learn from them as a health board and not as an individual... I feel the health board has got it right and really supports psychological safety.’
This nomination really demonstrates so clearly the importance of creating a psychologically safe environment to allow care to be as safe as possible. This team are able to measure their change and demonstrate the difference they have made clearly - well done
The Nomination:
The team embarked on a quality improvement project that aimed to increase communication, collaboration and create an environment of psychological safety following national and local reports and surveys which had identified opportunities to significantly improve communication between senior managers and staff within the service.
The improved psychological safety and workplace culture has enabled staff to work more collaboratively and feel able to escalate more readily. This has had a positive impact on clinical outcomes with a sustained reduction in the number of babies born with low APGAR scores and requiring resuscitation. There has also been a consistently downward trend in the number of intrauterine fetal deaths and the number of babies with hypoxic brain injury. We have seen a 34% increase in the numbers of maternity and neonatal incidents being reported, which is positive as it shows that staff feel able to report incidents.
There has been an extensive effort to ensure that the learning from incident reviews is shared with all team members, which is complicated by the large geographical area covered by the Health Board. This is done through monthly themes and trends shared on learning boards, in safety briefings, newsletters and lunch and learns. Opportunities for face-to-face and digital learning are offered, with developed innovative learning tools such as anonymous polling and formative quizzes, Choose Your Own Ending books, a boardgame, a computer game and Fetal Monitoring music videos.
Where learning is identified for specific clinical skills, all staff are supported to attend skills-based workshops. This has led to the development of annual workshops for Ultrasound skills and Assisted Vaginal Birth skills, provided in-house and free of charge. Where it is identified that a particular individual may have an area for improvement the focus is on providing timely access to training and enhanced clinical support. With this move away from a blame culture, there has been a reduction in long-term staff sickness and improved staff retention, reflecting improved staff wellbeing with the change in culture.
The inclusive and supportive nature of the team has improved engagement with other services. There is better partnership between Maternity and Gynaecology services which has resulted in work to streamline the processes for fetal loss so all service users have consistent and equitable care.
A follow-up visit from Health Education and Improvement Wales has shown that trainees in the department are having a better experience, and the Royal College of Midwives survey has also shown an increase in midwife satisfaction. The results of the quality improvement project survey show an improved staff experience of incident reporting with one respondent commenting “I feel safe to report incidents and supported to learn from them as a health board and not as an individual….I feel the health board has got it right and really supports psychological safety”.
The passion and perseverance of the Risk and Governance team, since the inception of this quality improvement project, has resulted in a remarkable ripple effect across the directorate with an improved culture of safety, learning and psychological safety.
