A Decade of Making Families Count: Our Journey and Reflections

This year marks our 10th anniversary. We are reflecting on a decade of dedicated work to improve family engagement and patient safety across health and social care. Explore stories, insights, and reflections from our members and learn more about our journey.

Introduction to 10 Years of Making Families Count

Rosi Reed is the Development and Training Coordinator and has been with Making Families Count since the beginning of 2015.

When Making Families Count began, we didn’t think that we were doing anything extraordinary. As we used to say constantly “this isn’t rocket science”, and working well with families following a serious patient safety incident or bereavement seemed like pure common sense to us. Probably because as a group, we knew only too well what the flip side of that looked like.

Defining Early Encounters

Several moments from the early days of Making Families Count training stand out in my memory, both from our first year of running face to face training events, which was 2015.
The first was meeting a Clinical Director for a Primary Care Network who approached me at only the first training session we ran, and actually the first one I spoke at. He insisted that he gave me “a present” which turned out to be some rescue remedy. His words I’ll never forget “Take this – it will help you a lot with your current situation”. Yes, he thought that rather than having good family engagement and an excellent investigation, what I really needed following my son’s death was some homeopathic remedy. Yet, at the time I have no doubt that he thought he was doing a good thing, and it really hadn’t occurred to him that something more robust and far reaching for families who lose a loved one in the death of the NHS was necessary.

In that same year we had a Q&A session at the end of a training day and a senior consultant said to me, and to the room “Rosi by name and rosy by nature – you guys are wearing rose tinted glasses if you think working better with families after a death will make any difference at all. All families want is someone to blame”.

Shaping Our Approach

In many ways, these early encounters helped to form our work and our opinions. I should thank everyone who told us what a waste of time our work was. I should thank the senior clinician who said to me “there’s no point in talking to families, all they do is weep and you can’t get any sense out of them”. All these comments, and many more helped us to form our training and to know where it was most relevant.

A Decade of Change

Over the last 10 years there have been many changes in healthcare and patient safety, some good and some not so good. We’ve been through the pandemic and several changes at the top of Government and in the NHS. When we first began we talked about the need for Family Liaison Officers in the NHS – unheard of then, now quite commonplace. We pushed for families contributing to ToR, again unheard of then and now quite normal. Perhaps most of all, we’ve seen almost everything we advocated for taken on with the new PSIRF (Patient Safety Incident Response Framework).

Our Work Continues

But do we think our work is done? Not at all. In fact, we think there is more need for our training than ever before. One of our founders, Julian Hendy, used to end our training days by saying “How would you want to be treated if it was you?” and those words ring as soundly today as they did 10 years ago.