Improving maternity and neonatal care in England: a formative evaluation of the implementation of the Core Competency Framework to improve multi-professional practice

Health

Improving maternity and neonatal care in England: a formative evaluation of the implementation of the Core Competency Framework to improve multi-professional practice

There is widespread concern about the quality and safety of maternity and neonatal services in England. There are worrying inequalities in outcomes. Reports indicate the crucial role of skillful and knowledgeable staff working well together. Yet we know that training is not always prioritised within our busy maternity and neonatal services, and that there is variability in such training.

To address this, NHS England developed a ‘Core Competency Framework’ (CCF) that includes suggested training modules and key ‘best practice’ principles: service user involvement; learning from local feedback/incidents/good practice; multidisciplinary team learning; and shared learning across Local Maternity and Neonatal Systems.

The Framework is intended to drive improvement in maternity and neonatal care. But we cannot yet say what its impact has been, particularly for those most at risk of poor outcomes. This project aims to fill that gap, by exploring the implementation, operation and impact of the Framework. This novel study includes a national survey of training practices, an ethnographic study of six representative maternity and neonatal units, including also local service users focus groups with those most at risk of poor outcomes and analysis of routinely collected outcome data to inform understanding of the framework’s impact on practice variation. Multidisciplinary joint interpretive forums at the local and national level will help us make sense of the data and feed into the development of a 'toolkit' for NHS England, to support the next version of the Framework.

Aims

To explore and enhance the implementation and impact of the CCF in England as it seeks to reduce variation in maternity and neonatal care.

Objectives:

1. Investigate the implementation of the CCF in England’s maternity and neonatal units and explore the determinants associated with its implementation.

2. Investigate the barriers and facilitators to the implementation of the CCF.

3. Describe the fidelity, adaptation and adoption of the CCF in local units.

4. In a sample of maternity and neonatal units in England, explore the role of the CCF in:

reducing variation in organisational, team and individual competence
reducing maternal and neonatal health inequalities

5. Gather different stakeholders’ views on the key findings from the research and to allow for their translation into a toolkit to support the development and implementation of the CCF version 3.

Share your views

If you have any questions or comments about the implementation of the Maternity and Neonatal Core Competency Framework in England that you want to share with us, we would be pleased to hear from you.

You can find out about the Framework here.

If you are a member of the public or an organisation representing maternity service users, please send your views to our Public and Patient Advocate, Jo Dagustun.

If you are a healthcare professional, please send your views to our Principal Investigator, Dr. Rebecca Whybrow.