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.

New Bespoke Training at Surrey and Borders

by

Our first bespoke training for 2024 will take place in April when we travel to Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust to deliver three days of bespoke face-to-face training to all the managers of this trust. The training will cover staff responsiveness and working with families with confidence, using Duty of Candour well, having difficult conversations with distressed patients and families, engaging well with people who have been part of an incident in the spirit of PSIRF, and lots more. We’re very excited to deliver this training and work with this organisation for the first time. Staff from this …

Read more

Trevor Stevens Speaks on Radio 4

by

Making Families Count member Trevor Stevens spoke to Marina Cantacuzino as part of her BBC Sounds series “Forgiveness – Stories from the Front Line”, which has also been shared on Radio 4. If you haven’t heard this programme yet, I strongly recommend it to you. It’s powerful and humbling though if you’ve lost a loved one to suicide, you might find it a upsetting.  Trevor talks so movingly about his lovely daughter Tobi and about why he chose afterwards to engage constructively with the trust who were caring for Tobi at the time of her death.  You can access the …

Read more

Making Families Count at RCPCH Annual Conference

by

This year, Making Families Count have been asked to speak at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health Annual Conference on 26 March in Birmingham. Rosi Reed will be speaking as part of a longer session on the use and implementation of Martha’s Rule and how we can improve the way clinicians work with families of young patients, particularly when the patient’s condition is deteriorating. Rosi’s presentation will focus on why clinicians sometimes fail to engage well with families, the barriers to good engagement, and how we can overcome them. In typical MFC style, Rosi will be using real-life …

Read more

New MFC Members

by

Making Families Count are pleased to announce that we have two new members, Trevor Stevens and Sue Willgoss, and our new members have already been busy working with MFC. Trevor has written pieces for our blog and been a speaker at several MFC webinars. Sue has been working with MFC members Jan Sunman and Stephen Habgood on our Autism training. We welcome both Trevor and Sue and look forward to working with them both in the future. We have no doubt that they’ll bring even more knowledge, experience, passion and commitment to the work of Making Families Count in the future.

Patient Safety Education Network

by

Rosi Reed of Making Families Count will be speaking at the Patient Safety Education Network on Friday 8 March. Her presentation is “The importance of establishing a meaningful relationship with families after a patient safety incident”, though she’ll also be talking about the work of Making Families Count and the training they offer around this.  Last year, Rosi was asked to speak at a similar event with a different group.  Chris Elson of PSEN was in the audience for that and then invited her to speak to their members, too. We find speaking at these type of events is a great way …

Read more

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

by

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 …

Read more

Using positive engagement to fill in the gaps

by

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 …

Read more

Navigating – an advocacy story

by

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 …

Read more

The importance of difficult conversations

by

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 …

Read more

“Misguided and Dangerous”

by

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 …

Read more