Strengthening team culture to improve perinatal and maternity safety

Health Innovation Kent Surrey Sussex has delivered a year-long perinatal culture and leadership programme to help maternity and neonatal teams across the region understand — and act on — the link between team culture, leadership and patient safety.

Challenge

National reports continue to highlight the role of organisational culture in poor maternity and neonatal outcomes, most recently Baroness Amos’s Interim Report into maternity and neonatal services (published 26 February 2026).

Persistent issues include families feeling unheard, inconsistent care, fragmented pathways, and workplace cultures where staff fear speaking up or escalating concerns. All of these undermine safety and quality of care.

Julie Smith, Health Innovation Kent Surrey Sussex Programme Manager: –

“Improving safety in maternity and neonatal care requires more than clinical pathways and protocols. It also depends on whether staff feel able to speak up, listen well, work across boundaries and act early when something does not feel right.”

Approach

The Perinatal Culture and Leadership Programme is a national NHS England initiative designed to improve the safety and quality of maternity and neonatal services by strengthening leadership and fostering positive, inclusive workplace cultures.

The programme focuses on supporting senior leaders to create psychologically safe, compassionate and respectful working environments. It brings together a quadrumvirate of leaders – the Director of Midwifery, Operations Director, Clinical Director and Neonatal Nurse Director – to work collaboratively to embed and sustain change.

We delivered the programme locally across six trusts through a combination of five face-to-face and three online workshops for maternity and neonatal teams. A total of 81 delegates attended the training.

Sessions were built around MOMENTS, a practical framework designed to nurture safety culture through everyday behaviours and interactions. Using structured cultural conversations and reflective exercises, teams explored how care is delivered, identified cultural barriers, and strengthened multidisciplinary relationships.

Staff reflected on how values such as transparency, respect, compassion, civility and inclusivity show up in daily practice, with open discussion of hierarchy, escalation behaviours and psychological safety. Workshops were supported by senior sponsors and quality improvement tools to help teams translate reflection into practical change.

Common areas of focus included escalation, communication, civility and building a more supportive, no blame culture. The programme also strengthened links with clinical deterioration pathways, enabling teams to review observation tools and escalation processes through a cultural lens.

Impact

In session feedback, 100% of delegates reported they felt confident or somewhat confident in their understanding of the benefits of the MOMENTS framework.

They identified MOMENTS as a useful framework for structuring Professional Midwifery Advocate conversations (meetings with a senior midwife trained to support staff wellbeing, professional development and culture improvement), having cultural conversations within their teams, and as an initial stage when beginning a quality improvement project.

Reflections on the session include greater confidence among staff to raise concerns, richer multidisciplinary collaboration, and improved understanding between midwifery, obstetric, neonatal and support staff groups. Face‑to‑face sessions were particularly impactful, creating space for honest dialogue and modelling positive leadership behaviours.

Formal delivery of the Perinatal Culture and Leadership Programme concluded at the end of April 2026. Perinatal teams across Kent, Surrey and Sussex now have the tools, shared language and leadership capability to continue strengthening culture and sustaining improvement over the long term.

Workshop participants: -“This work remains pivotal to shaping the way we interact as colleagues and ultimately, the care we provide.””Thank you, the session has really brought us together again as a team and I, for one, am looking forward to taking part in our quality improvement project.”

Find out more about this project and our wider work in neonatal safety, and contact the team