Making Families Count provides consultancy to help organisations in mental health care to work constructively and learn with traumatically bereaved and harmed families to improve care and safety.
Our consultancy is developed in discussion with you. We work with you to support
- effective family engagement throughout your service to ensure that people are safer and the quality of care improves
- compassionate and effective responses to patients and families when things go wrong, and
- ensure that effective learning takes place from serious incidents, making services safer and preventing others from suffering harm or losing loved ones.
Listening to and learning with families to improve care
We can design bespoke work for teams or for whole organisations.
We work with you to co-design work, to ensure we meet your organisational needs. We usually provide a blended mix of online and in person work.
We help organisations to identify, support, and learn from traumatically bereaved families. This work involves:
- Meeting with families identified by the Trust to discuss the changes and improvements they would like to see and how they would like to explain these to the Trust
- Supporting Trusts to recruit families who wish to support improvement and learning to Listening Events
- Organising workshops for Trust leaders with families to identify and agree areas for improvement
- Helping Trusts to establish a Families Panel or equivalent to oversee and support improvements
- Helping Trusts look at existing measures and data collection to monitor and evaluate improvements
To discuss how this work could help you please contact us.
Themes we cover
Our consultancy is relevant to
- 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 traumatically bereaved families
- Working well with angry and distressed families
- Supporting a blame-free learning culture for staff
- Confidentiality, informed consent and information giving and receiving
- The importance of the Family Liaison role to families
Our Speakers and Facilitators
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.
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)