Improving quality of care and staff wellbeing in maternity services

Communication, wellbeing and clinical errors in healthcare: How can we support maternity staff disclosing news that an error has been made to patients

Lead: Raabia Sattar (PhD student)

Collaborators: Judith Johnson (University of Leeds/BIHR), Rebecca Lawton (University of Leeds/BIHR), Dileep Wijeratne (Leeds Teaching Hospitals)

This PhD project focuses on healthcare staff, and aims to investigate how staff in maternity services can be supported to communicate the news to patients that an adverse event has occurred. It seeks to understand how the disclosure of adverse events affects staff wellbeing, and whether providing training in this area has the potential to enhance this. There are four main aims of this PhD project:

to systematically review the views and experiences of healthcare staff and patients on disclosure of adverse events
to understand the views and experiences’ regarding adverse event disclosure in UK maternity services through a qualitative interview study
to identify the most important components of an intervention to support UK maternity staff with adverse event disclosure
to evaluate whether an training intervention on adverse event disclosure is acceptable to healthcare staff, improves communication of adverse event disclosure and has the potential to improve staff wellbeing.

Publications:

Systematic review (submitted to submitted to BMJ Quality & Safety - Nov 2018 – review and resubmit): The views and experiences of patients and healthcare professional’s on the disclosure adverse events: A systematic review & qualitative meta-ethnographic synthesis

Contact | Raabia Sattar |ps15rs@leeds.ac.uk

Quality improvement in maternity services: Using video-reflexivity to improve the quality and safety of care

Lead: Siobhan McHugh (PhD student)

Collaborators: Rebecca Lawton (University of Leeds/BIHR), Dileep Wijeratne (Leeds Teaching Hospitals)

Within her PhD, Siobhan is evaluating the process of video-reflexive ethnography to determine whether this can be used to improve elements of teamwork and communication in high-risk multi-disciplinary healthcare teams. The research focuses on multi-disciplinary handovers in UK maternity units, and is considering elements of feasibility and acceptability of video-reflexive ethnography in healthcare staff, as well as the sustainability of any improvements.