The London Screening Quality Assurance Service (SQAS) team held a successful forum for screening coordinators and heads of midwifery from all London maternity units.
The purpose of the forum was to enable the SQAS team to disseminate any updates or changes within the antenatal and newborn screening programmes. It also provided provide opportunities to the screening coordinators and heads of midwifery from across London to build relationships with other trusts and share learning.
Guests speakers gave presentations during the morning. One London deputy head of midwifery provided feedback of a QA visit from the perspective of a trust. A screening coordinator presented details of how their trust managed to improve performance in screening women by 10 weeks.
Both sessions received positive feedback from the group.
In addition, the London SQAS team shared the common themes seen with screening safety incidents and the information provided by the maternity trusts on the 2014 to 2015 annual reports.
The afternoon started with a role play exercise around a screening safety incident. This was used as a basis for group work looking at:
- pulling out root causes
- getting action plans right
- identifying themes
- closing an incident and moving forward
Comments from forum delegates included:
Thanks again for an excellently executed and informative day. The group work on incidents / investigation was extremely helpful - learnt a lot from this.
All very helpful and raised a lot of issues that all units were encountering. Thanks.
Delegates also made requests and suggestions for issues to be covered in the next event.
Presentations from the forum can be viewed here:
-
Antenatal screening programme updates
2. Feedback from QA visits – themes and findings so far
3. QA visits – feedback from a trust
4. Newborn screening programmes update
5. Incidents review
6. Screening by 10/40
The most important message from the day was that we need to ensure all women and babies have access to high quality antenatal and newborn screening programmes.
Thank you to everyone who attended and in particular the speakers. If you would like to present at the next London antenatal and newborn screening forum, please email us.
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