Nurturing safety culture through everyday practices
MOMENTS - a framework of resources to nurture safety culture development through everyday practices together.
ABOUT
The everyday, little things we do make a difference to the care we provide to our service users and experiences of staff working in the NHS.
Understanding what and how we do these things is crucial to building positive safety cultures.
Safety culture is the the relationships, practices and values of EVERYONE in the NHS, performed EVERY DAY to provide COMPASSIONATE CARE for all.
But, finding the time to work out what we are doing well in our teams and making ‘safety culture’ tangible can seem overwhelming.
Moments is a framework to explore local safety cultures through everyday practices. We have designed a practical and easy to run workshop for healthcare professionals to support local safety culture improvement.
RESEARCH
MOMENTS has been developed out of research carried out by the SAPPHIRE (Social science APPlied Healthcare and Improvement REsearch) group, University of Leicester, on what makes a good safety culture, drawing on the experiences of ten maternity and neonatal services across England.
The project was a positive enquiry, identifying strengths without only focussing on mistakes, accidents or incidents, and exploring what contributes to a good safety culture.
RESOURCES
The Facilitator Guide, handouts and worksheets are designed to support healthcare teams to take next steps with their clinical teams, in response to their local Safety Culture survey report.
They consist of a series of exercises that teams can use to work with their teams to better understand their own local safety cultures.
This resource is designed to help leaders and teams understand both what is happening in their service around safety, but more importantly why this is happening and what it means for the implementation of more formal safety work.
Blog
Click below to read the blog post by by Gill Travers, Registered Midwife and Senior Project Manager at Health Innovation West of England: Why safety culture needs more than policies.
Testimonials
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Tony Kelly, National Specialty Advisor, National Maternity and Neonatal Programme, NHS England
As part of the work of the Perinatal Culture and Leadership Programme we have been keen to find a way to support clinical teams to understand how they make the transition to where they are to the place they want to be in relation to building supportive safety cultures.
Previously I have felt that we have only been able to describe the issues and highlight what the improvements needed are, but have not been able to support that journey.
Through the development and use of MOMENTS we now have a mechanism and framework that supports this process.
Teams can use the structures and frameworks to examine the relational aspects of interventions that they either already use of plan to use in their day to day work.
Rather than just focusing on the transactional aspects or clinical processes, MOMENTS allows the team to understand what behaviours and cultural factors support these interventions more clearly.
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Becky Wilson-Crellin, Clinical Lead, Culture and Leadership Maternity and Neonatal Programme (MNP), NHS England
Having worked as a midwife for over 20 years I have been on the receiving end of many initiatives and resources aimed at ‘improving’ culture and had had always found them to be intangible or too ‘research / education’ focused without that practical application being clear.
This is what makes MOMENTS different. It has the evidence base but can be practically applied to any situation- both in your professional or personal life. It really does provide a window in to your everyday ‘moments’ and encourages you to think about how you ‘show up’, the way you are, and how you do things, rather than just what you do.
It’s been quite the light bulb moment for me, and I have already seen the impact and value it can add to the conversation when testing it with clinical teams. It gave people confidence to talk about things the unspoken things like who has the ‘power’ in the room, what are the ‘norms’ we take for granted that have a huge impact on the culture of the shift.
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Gill Travers, Senior Project Manager, Health Innovation West of England
MOMENTS is quite a neutral tool to facilitate those (cultural) conversations, so it can help to remove some of that personal emotion of being involved in a patient safety event.
Some of the things that the student midwives were talking about were personally quite emotive to them and how they'd felt in practise, but they discussed that really freely with their peers and then fed back to me with their lecturer in the room. So actually, because they'd had that conversation (via MOMENTS), they felt reasonably safe to be able to sort of feedback to me their concerns.
NEED HELP?
If you would like more information on MOMENTS in practice please contact england.perinatalcultureleadership@nhs.net.
For more information about the research behind MOMENTS please contact nicola.mackintosh@leicester.ac.uk.