MOMENTS (Meanings, Competencies, and Materials in Everyday (N) Team Safety)

In this blog, Caroline Finch, Programme Development Lead for Maternity and Neonatal Safety Improvement Programme in Patient Safety Team at Health Innovation Manchester, explores how MOMENTS, a framework developed by the University of Leicester, helps staff enhance communication, collaboration, and compassionate care in maternity care.

As a midwife with over 30 years of experience of maternity and neonatal care, I’ve experienced many different reviews of maternity and neonatal services. Most recently, Donna Ockenden’s (2020 and  2022) independent review of maternity and neonatal services at Shrewsbury and Telford and Bill Kirkup’s (2022)  East Kent report.  These reports have noted the prevalence of culture and leadership issues within maternity and neonatal services, and the impact this has on the safety of women, babies and their families, as well as the impact this has on the workforce.  For example, toxic work environments can impact on retention and recruitment, ability to escalate and communicate when necessary and reduce opportunities for learning, quality improvement and better outcomes.

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 from ten maternity and neonatal services across England.

The project was a positive enquiry, identifying strengths and not only focussing on mistakes, accidents or incidents, and exploring what contributes to a good safety culture.

MOMENTS is a framework of resources to nurture safety culture development through everyday practices together.  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 relationships, practices and values of everyone in the NHS, performed every day to provide compassionate care for all.

The Maternity and Neonatal Safety Improvement Programme at Health Innovation Manchester facilitated MOMENTS Train the Trainer sessions for maternity and neonatal staff in Greater Manchester and East Cheshire with the aims of ensuring that attendees understand MOMENTS, experience what a MOMENTS conversation looks and feels like, and be ready to implement MOMENTS training to their own teams.

We have successfully engaged and empowered participants, enhancing their understanding of team safety practice with overwhelmingly positive from attendees:

As we wrap up, it’s clear that the MOMENTS training has made a significant impact, equipping attendees with the knowledge and confidence to enhance team safety practices. Now, it’s time for participants to cascade this training within clinical practice.

For more information on MOMENTS, please visit https://moments-safety.com/

To find out more about this work at Health Innovation Manchester, please contact: psc@healthinnovationmanchester.com