A study looking at the experiences of families and health care professionals following incidents involving NHS maternity care highlights critical factors for improving communication with families. The team, which included family and charity representatives as well as academics, hopes the findings from the study will drive improvements in open in a way that best supports both families and health care professionals. Open disclosure is when the NHS informs families that the care it has provided has directly caused harm.
Open disclosure should provide patients and families with honest answers and ensure learn from mistakes to prevent them from happening again.1 The study, called DISCERN, aimed to understand whether NHS maternity services in England involved families in investigations and reviews surrounding incidents and how this was done, what worked well, what didn't work well and why. The findings were outlined in a report in .
Building on hypotheses from , the new report identifies five critical factors to improve open disclosure in maternity care following incidents that caused harm or death to the baby or woman: The study was co-led by Mary Adams, Visiting Senior Research Fellow, and Jane Sandall CBE, Professor of Social Science and Women's Health, from King's College London, and carried out with collaborators at King's, Sands (the stillbirth and neonatal death charity), BirthRights, the University of Manchester and the Birth Trauma Association. Learning from parents, famil.