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Project: PERIPrem Project, West of England Academic Health Sciences Network (WEAHSN), South West Academic Health Sciences Network (SWAHSN) & South West Neonatal Network.

Contributor: Amie Turner, Parent representative to PERIPrem Project steering group

What aspects of culture did you focus on and what changes did you make? 

We used parents’ stories to really inspire teams to work together and help motivate them to create change, but also to celebrate the impact of all their hard work.  Sharing the parent perspective really also helps clinical teams to see a different side of their QI work.  Sometimes it is even more motivational than just seeing numbers and charts! As a parent on the steering group, we really advocated for the need for parent partnership in optimisation, and pushed the team to make a regional parent passport for perinatal optimisation.  Parents seem to feel this is very important.

What effect this has had on your team culture? 

The effect of having parents involved in PERIPRem had a massive positive effect on how the project team worked.  Preterm birth is so terrifying and unexpected, and we were able to make sure that the clinical leads got to view everything in a different light, to see the parent perspective.  I think this helped improve the duty of care to always consider how the parents feel and how this experience is for them.

What barriers have you had to overcome? 

The hardest thing was to make sure we had everything in place to help everyone across the whole region, and not just a small amount of people, or one or two hospitals, but we definitely achieved it.  One of the parent stories really helped the clinical teams to understand why it was so important to implement PERIPrem across the whole region – parents move between hospitals, and it’s so important for them to hear the same message in the same way no matter which hospital they go to.  Also, we had to implement this huge project during the Covid-19 pandemic, launching when it was at its worst so it was harder and more complicated but I definitely think it drove us to achieve more. 

What helped to make this successful? 

The things that made PERIPREM successful were real life stories, including parents’ voices and having parents fully involved with everything.  PERIPrem needed amazing team work and everyone was so important during the process.