Maternity teams across the Black Country are the first to jointly roll out a region-wide digital platform to engage with frontline staff and use their feedback to improve patient experience.

The Black Country Local Maternity and Neonatal System (BCLMNS) has championed a three-year partnership with ImproveWell which will be used in Maternity Services at Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust and Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust and Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust.

ImproveWell is a platform that helps NHS organisations to tailor the way that real-time frontline feedback is collected, quickly identifying areas for improvement as well as suggested solutions based on needs at a local or organisational level.

It has been used by more than 70 NHS organisations, including 18 Maternity teams, but this is the first time Maternity teams across the same region are deploying the platform together to drive improvement collectively, improving staff experience and the quality of service delivery. Areas targeted for improvement include proactively tackling employee retention, improving staff morale, and sharing best practice. The collaboration will help teams make immediate improvements and develop their own, new systems to continuously improve.

Gemma Haselgrove, Lead Retention Midwife at Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, said ImproveWell had been a useful tool in helping her to identify trends among colleagues.

She said: “The Band 5 Midwives have been using ImproveWell to capture how they feel. I have now formulated trends from all of our staff and am due to deliver these trends to our Senior Management Team.

“I have also started doing all exit interviews and stay conversations using ImproveWell and generated trends from this. I have set up regular meetings with the Student Midwives due to qualify in September and provided them with conditional job offers.

“Preceptorship and support have been highlighted as a trend. We are working towards aligning length of preceptorship with our Black Country colleagues and are working on ways to improve the support we provide. I think ImproveWell has helped us to engage in a more effective and meaningful way.”

ImproveWell captures suggestions from staff at all levels, and so encourages tangible, achievable improvement ideas to be put forward that often require no or little funding. Eighty per cent of the ideas put forward through ImproveWell by frontline staff require no funding, providing a feasible way for NHS organisations to proactively make improvements.

Separately, the NHS Black Country Integrated Care Board will be rolling out ImproveWell across Emergency Departments in its hospitals over the summer, targeted at gathering feedback to improve staff wellbeing as well as quality of care and patient experience.

Lara Mott, CEO and Co-founder of ImproveWell, said: “Frontline NHS workers across the country are feeling overstretched but they often also have the best ideas to improve safety and patient experience. When staff see their ideas implemented and they succeed, it makes the NHS a more satisfying place to work.

“These Maternity teams across the Black Country have committed to proactively listening to ideas from their staff, helping to capture plenty of ‘small but mighty’ changes that are easily implemented and make a big difference. We look forward to working with the Black Country teams to unlock these innovative frontline insights and improve the experience for staff and patients across the region.”