The NHS loves acronyms. Some of you may have heard of a particular acronym – VUCA. I think it describes our current environment working in health and care pretty well. VUCA stands for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
In such situations, it is important to reflect on what we are doing and why we are doing it. This leads me to talk about one of our programmes of work at the Improvement Academy via the Yorkshire & Humber Patient Safety Collaborative. Martha’s Rule supports us to focus on listening to patients, their families/carers and staff. Martha’s Rule is a patient safety initiative that allows people to raise concerns about physical deterioration. It is named after Martha Mills, a young girl who tragically died after a missed opportunity to treat sepsis, and aims to improve patient safety by empowering individuals to seek help when they feel their concerns aren’t being addressed.
We have been supporting sites across Yorkshire & Humber to implement Martha’s Rule for the past twelve months and will be continuing this support into 2026.
Recently we have also been asked to support Emergency Departments across England to learn with the teams how Martha’s Rule can used and how to make it as helpful as possible.
We use our wide and varied expertise to support teams to implement Martha’s Rule using a quality improvement approach. We recognise that this programme is not happening in isolation, and culture is an important foundation to any improvement/change work. We bring sites together in a learning community to generate and share ideas and openly discuss challenges being faced. Here are some topics we have covered in the past few months:
- How to design a survey to capture patient and staff feedback?
- How do we learn from Martha’s Rule escalations?
- How can we use the communications toolkit to raise awareness of Martha’s Rule?
- How do we capture patient insights into their own wellness in the Emergency Department?
We have created some short reports to share our learning and insights.
If you are interested or involved in implementing Martha’s Rule in your organisation, or specifically in your Emergency Department please contact Lizzie at Elizabeth.Sweeting@yhia.nhs.uk to hear more about the 1:1 support and learning community meetings.
