Rosi Reed

Rosi Reed is the company administrator for Making Families Count. In this role one of her duties is to update the Making Families Count website, edit and publish the blogs. She has been part of the Making Families Count training team from the beginning in February 2015. Rosi’s son Nico died unexpectedly in an NHS run supported living home in 2012. In his family, Nico was known as “the golden boy” and he was very much the heart and centre of his family. His death caused huge trauma for them, which was made so much worse by the way the family was treated by the NHS Trust responsible for his care. At the end of 2014, there was an Article 2 inquest into his death. This resulted in a 2.5-year investigation published in June 2018 which found Nico died as a result of poor care and poorly commissioned care. This investigation is now being examined by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. Since 2012, Rosi has campaigned tirelessly for better family engagement by the NHS at all levels. This work includes working for a year in 2019 as a Family Consultant for the charity Respond, putting together a training package for LeDeR investigators, to assist them in working better with families and providing more effective investigations. Rosi also worked with the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF), presenting at a series of Patient Safety Incident Roadshows around the country in 2018 and for two years (2017 & 2018) Rosi worked on the NHS England “Learning from Deaths” programme as a member of the steering group and co-wrote the “Learning from Deaths Guidance for Families”. Rosi has recently become a member of the Citizens Partnership Group for the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch and is part of the steering group “Learning from Deaths, Learning in Action” monitoring the progress across NHS Trusts in the UK by the “Learning from Deaths” guidance. She is active on social media and writes a widely read blog around the themes of bereavement, the grief journey, disability issues and healthcare, occasionally writing for journals and magazines on these themes.

Family Liaison Officers – the future of Family Support after NHS Incidents?

3 August 202321 June 2021 by Rosi Reed

Like so many organisations, over the last year we’ve had to adjust to running on-line webinars, instead of face-to-face training. We learned a lot from our face-to-face training and now we’re using that knowledge in our webinars. In our old style training we travelled all over England, running all day training sessions for up to 150 heath care staff members (very often NHS Trusts) from all levels, from CEO and Governors to staff who worked in A&E, Maternity and Wards. With staff who worked in Mental Health, staff who worked with elderly people, with children, with people with Learning Disabilities …

Using positive engagement to fill in the gaps

3 August 202317 November 2020 by Rosi Reed

Last week I met a lovely young woman whose brother had died from a brain tumour 10 months earlier. She felt that she could tell me about this because I met her in a work capacity and she had already listened to me talking about grief and my own struggles to find a way through traumatic bereavement. As we talked, she opened up a bit more and started telling me how she was feeling. I haven’t been able to get the conversation out of my head and the more I thought about it, the more I felt the need to …

Navigating – an advocacy story

3 August 202323 February 2020 by Rosi Reed

Trying to do a good job when you’re not completely sure of what you’re doing is difficult and can be very stressful. I think it happens to all of us. Most of us navigate our way through this by turning to a colleague and saying “I’m not sure how to do this, can you help?” and that support makes a huge difference to your stress levels and your ability to do the job well. But what if there is no-one to ask? What if there is no one you to turn to? Through MFC I’ve met many family members who’ve suffered a traumatic …

The importance of difficult conversations

3 August 20235 February 2020 by Rosi Reed

Last week I was speaking at a healthcare conference in London run by HC-UK. The majority of delegates were senior clinicians and management from NHS Trusts and private healthcare providers. At the end of my presentation, I asked for questions. There were some very good questions (some of which I’ll come back to in future blogs) and one that stood out for me was a question from a clinician who heads up an NHS Trust team. He asked, “how do I deal with the problem of my staff not knowing how to have difficult conversations with families after a serious incident?” I asked him …

“Misguided and Dangerous”

5 September 202319 July 2019 by Rosi Reed

It was announced on Wednesday 17 July that the NHS has decided to stop funding the automatic investigation of all killings by mental health patients. This announcement took many people totally by surprise, and in the case of families bereaved by mental health homicide, shock and horror. Making Families Count member and founder of the influential charity Hundred Families, Julian Hendy is quoted in the Guardian article which blew the lid on this astounding decision by NHS England. You can read the article in full here: Cuts to study of killings by mental health patients ‘put people at risk’ In response …

Making an impression at the Patient Safety Congress

3 August 202311 July 2019 by Rosi Reed

This time last week I was at the Patient Safety Congress in Manchester. I had an excellent time and met so many interesting and impressive people. It was also an opportunity to do a lot of networking (which is always so valuable) and meet up with people I’ve worked with in the past and now seldom see. It was an impressive event. Really well run, really well organised and incredibly well attended. There were over 1000 participants and almost 450 delegates, presenters and speakers. Over 2 days I went to a hugely varied number of presentations and talks and while some of …

Getting to know Making Families Count – Rosi Reed

3 August 202326 June 2019 by Rosi Reed

This is the second of a series of blogs in which the members of Making Families Count write about their personal journey and why working with MFC means so much to them. ROSI REED (Administrator – Making Families Count) I’m proud of working for Making Families Count but the price I’ve paid to do this work was very, very high. Looking back to my early life it would seem to be unlikely that I’d end up working with a company like MFC. I left school at 16 with no qualifications, no ambitions and no plans. Not long after I had …

Staff inspired to “make families count” after training to improve practice and engagement

3 August 202322 May 2019 by Rosi Reed

On 13 May 2019 the first of two “Making Families Count” training events was held by Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) to help staff work more compassionately and effectively with families whose loved ones have died or been seriously hurt while under the Trust’s care. Getting family engagement right, from the beginning, is key to ensuring NHS organisations learn from their mistakes, making sure they are never repeated, and save grieving families and staff from going through the ordeal of court action. The day also included lively group discussions, and tips and suggestions on what to do and …