Join Making Families Count for a new series of lunchtime online seminars for families, carers, and health professionals.
These free one-hour sessions bring together expert speakers with family carers to explore key issues in mental health care. This autumn we will consider what co-production should mean and why it matters; the work of Family Liaison Officers, and how do we encourage organisations to learn from deaths?
Each event will include the opportunity to submit questions in advance.
This series is for:
- Families and carers
- Mental health professionals
- NHS and healthcare staff
- Anyone interested in patient safety and family involvement in care
Upcoming Sessions
1.Co-production: what is it and why does it matter?
Date: 28 Oct
Format: Online
Duration: 1 hour 1.00 – 2.00
With: Raf Hamaizia, Karen Lascelles and Dorit Braun.
Chair: Julie Kerry
Raf Hamaizia is Head of Lived Experience and Co-production at Cygnet Healthcare, a Trustee of Mental Health Design and Non Executive Director at Co-production Care. Raf is a leading mental health campaigner and expert on recovery, co-production and Lived Experience.
Karen Lascelles is Family Engagement Consultant at Making Families Count. Karen also works as a Senior Lecturer in mental health nursing and has been a mental health nurse for 35 years.
Dorit Braun is Chief Executive of Making Families Count. Following a traumatic bereavement Dorit has been active in working to improve how mental health services work well with families as partners in care.
About this session
Mental health services have developed Experts by Experience work to involve patients/service users in services, but the engagement of family and friends carers has progressed much more slowly. It’s complicated by complex family relationships and potential disagreements and estrangements, yet family and friends know their loved one best of all and hold information that can assist with safety planning, understanding risk and supporting recovery.
This session will explore:
- What co-production is – and what it is not.
- How co-production with patients/service users can work well
- How can we improve co-production with family and friends carers
- What best practice looks like
2.The role of Family Liaison Officers in Patient Safety: what should families expect?
Date: 18 November
Format: Online
Duration: 1 hour 1.00 – 2.00
With – Magda Wrobleska-Trojanowic, , Kirk Wilson and families who have experienced working with a FLO
Chair: Julie Kerry
Magda Wrobleska-Trojanowic is family liaison team lead in Hampshire and IOW Healthcare NHS Trust, specialising in engagement and involvement of those affected by patient safety incidents. She is a recognised national leader in NHS FLO practice, co-chairing the National NHS FLO Forum and contributing to national initiatives in this area.
Magda was appointed as the Trust’s sole Family Liaison Officer in July 2019 and has since successfully expanded the service through additional team resources. She qualified as a barrister in 2010, initially practising in civil litigation before joining Hampshire Constabulary as a Police Constable and specialist Safeguarding Officer. Her policing career also included work in investigations, including major crime, and she served as a Police Federation representative focusing on ill health retirement.
Kirk Wilson is a retired police officer where he was also a ‘FLO’ passing his course in 2008 making his way to become a Family Liaison Co-ordinator and also being part of the FLO training team.
He joined Norfolk and Suffolk Mental Health Trust (NSFT) in 2023 after his retirement where he helped launched the role from new within the trust.
He is also a TRiM (Trauma Risk Management) practitioner and is passionate about supporting bereaved families and also colleagues.
Family contributors tbc
About this session
Families are contacted by a Family Liaison Officer from the NHS at one of the most vulnerable moments people are likely to experience – following an unexpected and traumatic death. Families, often overwhelmed by grief, face arranging the funeral, an NHS investigation, a Coroner’s Inquest – processes that are unfamiliar, confusing and often alarming. Families describing these processes talk about feeling lost, frightened, confused, faced with trying to ask questions to systems they don’t understand. The Family Liaison Officer can offer support, information, understanding, signposting and consensual referrals to other sources of help. But not all Trusts employ them and it is not always clear how their insights help Trusts learn and improve.
The session will explore:
- The role of Family Liaison Officers? – A national perspective
- The difference between a Family Liaison Officer working in the NHS and in the Police
- How families experience Family Liaison Officers
- How we hope this role will develop
Making Families Count has information about NHS investigations and how families should expect to be involved on our Making Change Resource Hub
3. Is anyone really learning from deaths?
Date: 16 December
Format: Online
Duration: 1 hour 1.00 – 2.00
Led by: Dr Zoe Brummell, Critical Care and Perioperative Medicine Consultant, UCLH, Medical Examiner, Camden Medical Examiners Office, Academic Lead, NIHR CLPSRC
With Family member tbc
Chair: Julie Kerry
Dr Zoe Brummell, MBChB, MSc, MRCP, FRCA, FFICM, RCPath (ME)
Dr Brummell is a Intensive Care and Perioperative Medicine Consultant at University College London Hospital. Her interests are in patient safety, healthcare policy, qualitative research, communication with families, end of life care, medical ethics and medical law. Dr Brummell undertook a PhD at University College London looking at learning and organisational learning as an outcome of healthcare policy, specifically evaluating the NHS Learning from Deaths programme. She is now undertaking an MA in Medical Ethics and Law at Keele University. In 2023 Dr Brummell was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to look at Improving family involvement and bereavement care in end of life care in adult Intensive Care. Dr Brummell is the Academic Career Development co-lead for the NIHR Central London Patient Safety Research Collaboration and a Medical Examiner at UCLH.
About this session
Dr Brummell will summarise her research into the Learning from Deaths programme and explore the obstacles to organisational learning as well as the ways it should happen.
The session will explore
- How the Learning from Deaths programme failed to learn
- What gets in the way of learning
- What learning that leads to improvements looks like
- Why partnership with families for organisational learning matters and what it looks like
Zoe Brummell has written a summary of her research which is on our website.
Booking Information
Please use the individual booking links to register for each session.
Free to attend. But please donate whatever you can afford to Making Families Count to help to support our work. We rely on donations to keep going. Thank you.
Advance booking required