Training and Consultancy

Making Families Count runs powerful and inspirational training for health and social care commissioners and providers, the voluntary sector, and public organisations in the UK.

Frank Mullane presentation

Our training is designed to enable you and your team

  • to respond effectively and compassionately to patients and families when things go wrong, and
  • to ensure that effective learning takes place from serious incidents, making services safer and preventing others from suffering harm or losing loved ones.
Samantha Allen, Chief Executive, Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

Making Families Count training is the most powerful training session I have attended. It has left a lasting impact on me and made me think differently about working with families.

Samantha Allen, Chief Executive, Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

Our speakers have a breadth of lived experience of serious harm or the death of a loved one whilst in NHS or social care, loss through suicide, mental health homicide, and fatal domestic abuse. We also have senior health and social care practitioners who share their expertise and experience.

Webinars

We offer a series of webinars covering such topics as Duty of Candour, Patient Engagement, and the implementation of the Patient Safety Incident Review Framework (PSIRF), suicide prevention, and working with distressed families. These webinars can be booked individually or at a reduced cost for groups.

In the room workshops

Bespoke Training

Bespoke training programmes are designed for your teams or for whole organisations. We have worked with over 45 organisations providing bespoke large-scale training workshops and group training events. These can be delivered as online training webinars or face-to-face inhouse training, whichever suits the needs of the organisation best.

The programmes are co-designed with you to ensure they meet your individual and organisational needs. They can be held at a date, time and, in the case of face-to-face training, a venue of your choosing. Also, they can include models of cascade training with resource materials for you to share in your organisation.

Watching a presentation

Topics

Our bespoke training can cover a wide variety of subjects, including:

  • PSIRF implementation and guidance around good family engagement in investigations
  • Duty of Candour – from a family perspective, the implications for policy and practice
  • Suicide prevention and working with families and staff bereaved by suicide
  • Delivering bad news well to families and having difficult conversations
  • Positive engagement with families – top tips for working with traumatically bereaved families
  • Working well with angry and distressed families
  • Supporting a blame-free learning culture for staff
  • Improving family involvement in serious incident investigations and report writing
  • Experience of the Family Liaison Role and its importance to families.

Consultancy

The Making Families Count team has extensive experience working with organisations to help you review and develop your organisational policies and procedures and ensure they have positive family engagement at the heart of your patient safety. Contact us for more information and to discuss your requirements.

Lucien Champion Presentation

Looking at all your faces when you are re-counting your stories – the disbelief at what had happened, how harrowing it was – we needed to hear that… You don’t want someone to have to fight to get the answers. You don’t want to be that nurse that they remember because you didn’t care. (comment from a serious incident investigator who attended our training)

Learning Outcomes

  • All our training is aligned to the requirements of the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF)
  • Assists with improving the delivery of the Duty of Candour
  • Promotes a deeper understanding of confidentiality and legal frameworks in your organisation
  • Encourages improved learning and identification of issues in incident management
  • Promotes a collaborative incident investigation process that is thoughtful, compassionate and supportive to families and staff
  • Supports staff in having difficult conversations with families
  • Enables organisations to have a more efficient and cost-effective investigation process
  • Reflects the conclusions in the CQC (2016) report “Learning, Candour and Accountability”
  • Reinforces the guidelines of NHS “Learning from Deaths” guidance 2018

Photos © Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust.