Making Families Count is a not-for-profit Community Interest Company working to improve the way mental health and care services for adults involve, support and learn from families – especially when something has gone seriously wrong. 

Our work turns painful experiences into powerful change – improving safety for everyone.  

Making Families Count (MFC) exists to help services improve care for people experiencing acute mental distress or crisis.   

Why We Exist 

When a loved one dies or is harmed in the care of the NHS, families should be treated with compassion and included in understanding what happened. Yet many families tell us they are met with silence, defensiveness or exclusion at the very moment they need support the most. 

At the same time, NHS staff often feel distressed, unsupported and unsure of what they can safely say. This combination leads to missed learning, broken trust, and deepened trauma. 

We exist to change this. 

Families hold vital knowledge about their loved ones. Their insights can be life-saving – and when harm has occurred, their involvement is essential for meaningful learning and improvement. 

What We Do  

We bring together a unique partnership of traumatically bereaved and seriously harmed families and experienced health professionals. Together, we model the compassionate, collaborative approach that we believe should be embedded across all healthcare settings. Our work helps to prevent future harm, improves patient safety, and offers families the dignity, honesty and involvement they deserve. 

We work with families in the aftermath of deaths by suicide, mental health homicides, and deaths of neurodiverse adults or adults with learning disabilities who have died in state care.  We also work with families been harmed while seeking mental health support for loved ones.  We support families to use their painful experiences to contribute to improving care, so that people in acute distress or crisis can be met more effectively and compassionately.    

We do not provide counselling or advocacy services. 

We recognise the demands and constraints of organisations to engage openly and constructively with families.   Our focus is on improving care so that it is more compassionate, humane, relational and curious, contributing to improved quality of lives and learning when things have gone wrong.    

The primary task of MFC is to transform the lived experience of families affected by serious harm into shared learning that improves care and safety by focussing on how health and care organisations work with families and care for people in acute distress or crisis.   

Our vision is that health and care organisations routinely engage with familiesas advocates and carers for their loved one, collaborating to provide safe and compassionate care.  

Our purpose  MFC exists to improve how health and care organisations engage with families, as advocates and carers for their loved ones, and, when things go wrong works with families to learn with them to improve future care and reduce harm  

Our mission is to bridge the gap between services and families to reduce harm, strengthen safety practices, increase family inclusion, and improve compassionate care.  

The values that underpin our work  

• Power dynamics: we recognise the differential power dynamics that exist in coproduction to support effective collaboration.   

• Authenticity: we encourage honest sharing of lived experiences to drive change  

• Collaboration:  we work in partnership with families and healthcare professionals  

• Compassion: we recognise the impact of distress, harm and bereavement on both families and professionals.  

• Constructive challenge: we help healthcare organisations question and improve their systems, culture and practice  

• Learning and improvement: we are committed to learning from families’ experiences   

Why family engagement matters 

Listening and engaging with families in all areas of healthcare improves patient care, supports better patient outcomes and improved safety, and improves learning for individuals and services.   

Families know their unwell family member well and their knowledge is vital to clinicians in assessment and treatment. This is true for all aspects of healthcare, including for example understanding symptoms, pain thresholds and what people can and cannot manage following discharge. 

Listening and engaging with families in all areas of healthcare offers vital opportunities to listen to and learn from families. 

Lived Experience Leadership 

We have a Families’ Panel to involve and shape all our work. We provide information and support to families.  Families on the panel can choose to use their lived experience to help others by becoming speakers, trainers or advisors in our work. 

Training and Consultancy 

We deliver webinars, bespoke training and consultancy for health and care organisations, including our NHS-funded and independently evaluated eLearning programme, Life Beyond the Cubicle. Our training helps staff communicate with compassion, involve families in care during crises, and meet their responsibilities under the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF). 

Embedding Culture Change  

We work collaboratively with NHS Trusts to build strong, consistent approaches to family engagement at every level – from frontline care to senior leadership. This involves co-production,  where traumatically bereaved families work alongside leaders to design and improve services. 

Please consider a donation

Can you help Making Families Count increase our influence to improve patient care and safety?

We want to do all we can to make sure families are properly involved in the care of their loved ones when unwell and in the care of health services. We know that family involvement keeps people safer.

And if harm has occurred we want to do all we can to make sure families are properly involved in investigations and that learning and change do take place.

Regular financial support strengthens our ability to plan so if you can give a regular amount, however small, that really helps.