Continuity of Midwifery Carer and Care Opinion

My name is Maria Garvey and I am the Lead Midwife for Continuity of Midwifery Carer Service (CoMC) in the Southern Health and Social Care Trust, Northern Ireland. Continuity of Midwifery Carer is an exciting new way of working that provides integrated, appropriate and seamless care for all women across the continuum of pregnancy, birth and early parenting period. When fully implemented this will become the standard model of maternity care in Northern Ireland. The implementation of CoMC in Northern Ireland was as a result of policy announcements by the Department of Health as well as the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s (NMC) publication of Future Nurse Future Midwife Education and Proficiency Standards (2018). These documents recommended that maternity services in Northern Ireland should implement the CoMC model, acknowledging that this will require significant transformational change.

We decided to use Care Opinion to generate feedback from our patients as a way to evidence how important and useful the CoMC service is within the trust. We have had a specific QR code designed for Team Emerald by our trust facilitators. As women have their named Midwife a great relationship is formed and the Midwives feel happy to discuss Care Opinion. As this is a new service we are keen to ascertain what we are doing well or what do we need to improve. The women are reminded that they can give feedback at any time during their pregnancy journey.

All senior leaders are involved and we have been supported by the fabulous Care Opinion trust facilitators and obviously the team members themselves. Staff are delighted with the positive feedback and can use the stories as practice related feedback for their NMC revalidation. The reaction from patients has also been phenomenal, they love this new service. I have added below the word clouds generated from our stories. We have had 72 positive stories with 156 deliveries (46% of patients accessing CoMC shared a story on Care Opinion) and 96% of these had a criticality score of 0, so the feedback speaks for itself!

We have lots planned going forward such as rolling Care Opinion out into our other CoMC team; Team Sapphire. Our teams are named after precious stones and all the staff who work within CoMC are just as precious. They will also be given their own unique QR code generated from the Invitation Links on Care Opinion. We aim to continue to listen and learn from service users, embed the concepts of Care Opinion through training and provision of individual QR codes. Work in collaboration with our Trust Care Opinion facilitators and finally support quality improvements initiatives highlighted through Care Opinion relating to CoMC.