The report details findings and recommendations for improvement following Somerst MNVP’s annual ’15 Steps’ visits to the hospitals in July 2024.

During the visits, a group of current and recent service users and Somerset MNVP staff and volunteers used the NHS England 15 Steps toolkit to observe first impressions of the care environments and interactions with staff. They identified strengths and areas for improvement across five key themes:

• Welcoming and informative
• Safe and clean
• Friendly and personal
• Organised and calm
• Accessible and inclusive.

The report outlines key recommendations for each hospital, including suggestions for improved signage, decluttering and refreshed décor, accessibility for people with mobility issues, and the introduction of more personal touches in the hospital environments to create a warmer, less clinical and more inclusive atmosphere.

Key recommendations for Yeovil District Hospital include:

• Welcoming and informative: Enhance signage, particularly in the main maternity reception, antenatal and scanning areas, to ensure clarity and better navigation; and use language that is sensitive to diverse service users.
• Safe and clean: Maintain high standards by regularly inspecting and cleaning and repairing damaged areas.
• Friendly and personal: Use artwork and more welcoming cots to create a more homely, less clinical atmosphere in maternity and neonatal areas, and improve privacy in the Special Care Baby Unit and the Day Assessment Unit.
• Organised and calm: Create a more relaxing environment with natural lighting, including in labour rooms, and reduce clutter, including in the Special Care Baby Unit and the Early Pregnancy Assessment Centre.
• Accessible and inclusive: Ensure wheelchair accessibility in all areas, especially reception spaces, make sure information is easy to find and use, and provide key information in more inclusive formats and languages.

Key recommendations for Musgrove Park Hospital include:

• Welcoming and informative: Improve signage, including for the Early Pregnancy Assessment Centre, Bracken Birth Centre and Transitional Care, making them easier to find and follow for patients and visitors.
• Safe and clean: Regularly address maintenance issues, such as repairing cracks in bath panels, removing mold in shower rooms, and replacing stained seating, and add tap monitors to prevent scalding.
• Friendly and personal: Enhance environments so that they feel less clinical, more homely and welcoming, including in the Early Pregnancy Assessment Centre, Special Care Baby Unit, and the Bracken Birth Centre. Add frosted plastic to windows to improve privacy in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, labour ward bathrooms and recovery rooms.
• Organised and calm: Improve storage solutions and use of space, reduce clutter and information overload in areas like the antenatal clinic.
• Accessible and inclusive: Standardise the language used on signage and ensure that all areas are accessible, including adding handrails and chairs in labour ward bathrooms.

What Somerset MNVP liked about both hospitals

The visiting group highlighted several positive aspects of the services at both Yeovil District and Musgrove Park Hospitals. Many members of staff were praised for their warm, friendly, and welcoming approach, helping to make families feel cared for and respected. Additionally, the improvements made in recent years were appreciated by the group, including updated signage and the addition of personal touches in some areas.

Announcing the report, Dylan Perry, SMNVP Lead, said: “Somerset MNVP is committed to ensuring that service user voices are at the heart of maternity and neonatal care improvements. I want to thank all the service users who joined us for the 15 Steps visits and contributed so constructively; their personal stories, insights, and recommendations are at the heart of this report.

“We know the NHS faces many challenges, but the warmth, friendliness, and dedication of the staff we met is reassuring. The 15 Steps visits enable us to guide improvements to hospital spaces and facilities to ensure they match the quality of care provided by staff, so that maternity and neonatal care in Somerset is safe, inclusive, and supportive for all families.

“We have shared this report with leadership teams at Yeovil District and Musgrove Park Hospitals, as well key partners and stakeholders in maternity and neonatal care, and we will review progress in 2025 during regular safety walkabouts and further 15 Steps visits.”

Sally Bryant, Director of Midwifery for Somerset NHS Foundation Trust (SFT), said: “I want to say a very big thank you to Somerset MNVP and their service users who have given up their time to visit our maternity units at Musgrove Park Hospital and Yeovil District Hospital and give us their feedback on the environments within our units.

“It is incredibly important to hear the voice of mothers, pregnant people and families, and we will incorporate this feedback into our ongoing work to improve our maternity services. This includes positive feedback about areas that are welcoming – and that we may be able to replicate – and feedback about areas that we need to improve.

“These include additional changes to make signage clearer, work to make some environments more accessible, feel less clinical and support privacy, and a need to review posters and information displays to avoid information overload and make information inclusive and accessible to all.

“A lot of the feedback reported relates to the condition and maintenance of our estate. The poor condition of the building in which Musgrove Park Hospital’s maternity unit is housed is a big concern to us. We have been working for a number of years on plans to replace it as part of the New Hospitals Programme and are awaiting the outcome of the national review of the programme.

“Nevertheless, this feedback highlights the importance of ongoing maintenance and replacement of older fixtures and fittings and of making it clear when improvements are being made or are imminent. For example, at the time of the visit, essential maintenance work was being undertaken and the cleaning team was onsite to ensure a speedy response to the works, but our visitors were understandably not aware of this.

“Once again we thank the Somerset MNVP for their feedback and their willingness and commitment to working with us.”

Read the full report: 15 Steps for maternity and neonatal care in Somerset – Yeovil District Hospital and Musgrove Park Hospital (Nov 2024)

Share your feedback about maternity or neonatal care in Somerset.

• Welcoming and informative
• Safe and clear
• Friendly and personal
• Organised and calm
• Accessible and inclusive.

SMNVP shared videos about their findings on social media and invited further input from people who couldn’t attend the visits.

The new report highlights what SMNVP liked, along with recommendations for change and improvement for each area of maternity and neonatal services including reception, pregnancy and day care assessment units, scanning clinics, antenatal and postnatal areas, labour wards, special care units and bereavement spaces.

SMNVP has shared the report with maternity and neonatal leadership teams at the hospitals as well as with other partners working in maternity and neonatal care. They will monitor progress made by NHS Somerset Foundation Trust by attending regular safety walkabouts, meeting with the leadership teams for updates on the recommendations made in the report and repeating the 15 Steps visits again in 2024.

Announcing the report, Laura Perry SMNVP Lead, said: “I’m proud to be working with our community to develop our local maternity and neonatal services. We know that the right care and support during pregnancy is vital and we want our hospital spaces and facilities to match the wonderful, personalised care that is so often provided by staff. Our 15 Steps report will help services get that right for families.”

Commenting on the report, Alison Dennett, Head of Midwifery at Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We have welcomed the team visiting our maternity units in Somerset and value the 15 Steps feedback. Continuing to work together with the Somerset MNVP team, enables us to reach out to our women, birthing people and families in a way that we would not accomplish alone. We will be working to achieve the recommendations from the feedback highlighted in this report and look forward to sharing our progress with the team.”

Read the full report for detailed findings and recommendations: 15 Steps for maternity and neonatal in Somerset

 

Find out more about the work of SMNVP and how to get involved as a volunteer by visiting: Somerset MNVP, follow their social media, or get in touch by email somersetMVP@evolvingcommunities.co.uk

Last year, SMVP represented maternity service users and worked with maternity care providers and decision makers to design, develop, and improve maternity care at a local, regional, and national level. They have made sure that services understand people’s needs and use their expertise to develop innovative and effective solutions.

SMVP and its volunteers worked with NHS partners on a broad range of coproduction projects last year, including:

• Design and implementation of a new Somerset Maternal Mental Health Service (working with Somerset CCG and Maternal Mental Health Teams).
• Design and production of Somerset’s pregnancy and baby loss personalised care plan to improve the quality and consistency of bereavement care (working with Somerset NHS Hospital Trusts).
• Improving communications and support for Black, Asian and minority ethnic families, through production of an operational policy and the creation of leaflets that were translated into 20 different languages to be given to all Black, Asian and other ethnic minority women being looked after in Somerset (working with the Somerset Local Maternity and Neonatal System (LMNS)).
• Development of communications materials to support Somerset Public Health’s Healthy Pregnancy Project and guiding their work with service users (working with the LMNS Public Health Midwife).

In addition, the Chair of SMVP, Donna Butland, sat alongside maternity service professionals on over 50 strategic planning, decision-making and project groups, making sure the voices of maternity service users are heard and acted on at the highest level.

Announcing the annual report, Donna Butland, Chair of the Somerset Maternity Voices Partnership, said:

“I am immensely proud of what we have managed to achieve this year, despite the challenges of COVID. We have shown our understanding of the pressures that maternity care units have been working under, but we have continued to champion the voices of those using maternity services. We have made sure that your expertise and perspectives are heard, respected, and valued at the highest level by those making decisions, and that your input is sought at every stage to help drive change and improvement in Somerset’s maternity services. As we recover from the pandemic, it is more important than ever that we work together to learn from these challenging times.”

Becky Applewood, Deputy Director of Women’s and Children’s Health, Somerset Clinical Commissioning Group, commented:

“The last couple of years have been a challenging time for the NHS, including maternity services. Throughout all the pressure, the MVP have supported us while making sure that we never lose sight of what matters to Somerset families. Our aim is to ensure those who need our maternity services are kept safe, get the support they need, and have the best possible experience. Keeping those that need our services at the centre of all we do is essential and I truly believe that working alongside our MVP improves our services in every way. I would encourage every person in Somerset who is using or has recently used our maternity services to be part of the MVP, we need to hear about your experiences so that we can review and make relevant changes.”

Read the full Somerset Maternity Voices Annual Report 2020/21 to find out more about their work, to hear some of the real stories that have been shared to help improve maternity services learn and improve, and to find out what they will be focusing on in 2021/22, including the Ockenden Report.

Find out more and keep up to date with the work of the Somerset Maternity Voices Partnership by visiting: Somerset MVP and follow their social media.

The MVP, which began work in 2019, is an independent forum for people to share their experiences with maternity services in Somerset.  They work with a wide range of NHS and voluntary sector organisations which provide maternity care and support, making sure that public feedback is used to help develop and improve local maternity services.

The MVP annual report outlines several significant changes that have been introduced to make maternity care better in Somerset, demonstrating the enormous value of listening to public feedback.

Greater inclusion and support for partners: The MVP worked with Somerset NHS Clinical Commissioning Group to introduce the ‘DadPad’, providing information and support to help new fathers or partners develop the confidence and skills they need to care for their baby.  The MVP also launched a Dad’s Breakfast Club, giving men a place to go for support and to socialise with other fathers.

Better antenatal education:  The MVP used public feedback to help Somerset’s Hospital Trusts and Public Health to develop and improve antenatal support in Somerset.  This included the introduction of new antenatal classes in Taunton and South Somerset, and the launch of a new digital maternity toolkit across Somerset to support people through pregnancy, birth and postnatal care.

More personalised maternity care and continuity of care:  Through their work with the Local Maternity and Neonatal System, the MVP shared powerful real-life stories to help maternity care commissioners and providers understand how to provide better personalised care and continuity of care.

Improving quality and safety in maternity care: Through their work with the South West Maternity and Neonatal project, the MVP presented people’s real-life experiences of postpartum haemorrhage to inform quality and safety improvements in postnatal care.

Information and support during Covid-19: As pregnant people became anxious about the virus and the impact on their care options, the MPV was a vital link between those needing and providing maternity care.  They provided valuable information and support including virtual sessions for expectant mothers.  They also helped services understand and respond to people’s concerns, for example by introducing a dedicated maternity phone line and reinstating the option of face-to-face appointments.

Online survey about maternity care: Over 100 people completed the MVP’s online survey about their maternity care experiences during COVID-19 (April to November 2020).  The detailed survey results have been shared with those who provide maternity services in Somerset to inform future developments in maternity care.

Donna Butland, Chair of the Somerset Maternity Voices Partnership, said: “Since we launched Somerset Maternity Voices in 2019, we have made great strides to bring the voices of Somerset families into the development of maternity services in Somerset.  We’ve connected with communities across the county, finding out about the changes and support people want and need.  We’ve raised awareness and understanding of what is important to women, birthing people, their babies, and their families, and built productive partnerships that have led to some really positive changes in maternity care.  I would like to thank everyone who has shared their story with us, as well as our volunteers and those we work with who share our commitment to improving maternity care in Somerset by listening to local people.”

Becky Applewood, Deputy Director of Women’s and Children’s Health, Somerset Clinical Commissioning Group, commented: “Reading this report reminded me of how much our Maternity Voices Partnership (MVP) has achieved in the last two years.  The increased understanding that comes from true engagement with local women and their families, and involving them in developing maternity services, cannot be underestimated.  We would encourage all Somerset women and families who are involved with maternity services to share their stories with the MVP as their feedback really influences decisions and service development.  We would also like to thank Donna and her team for their hard work.  We look forward to continuing our work together to give Somerset families the best possible maternity experience.”

Read the full publication: Somerset Maternity Voices Annual Report 2019/20.

Find out more and keep up to date with the work of the Somerset Maternity Voices Partnership by visiting: Somerset MVP and follow their social media.