'The Connection Project' is a culture-change program for Leeds Maternity that aims to improve quality, safety and staff wellbeing - by strengthening the human connections at the heart of maternity care.
UPDATES
STAFF SURVEY IS NOW LIVE...
The survey for all LTHT maternity staff is now live. We want to hear your honest opinions about your experience working in the department which will be used to help shape the cultural transformation work.
CLICK HERE to complete the survey
WHAT IS THE CONNECTION PROJECT?
The Connection Project provides a unifying framework for cultural transformation across Leeds Maternity. It responds directly to the themes identified by the 2024 CQC reports and the 2025 MSSP diagnostic - fear and fatigue among staff, fragmented learning systems, inconsistent teamwork, and a loss of trust between staff, leadership, and families.
Centred on four domains of connection - Self, Team, System, and Patients - it translates these findings into practical action: supporting psychological safety and wellbeing, rebuilding collaboration and trust, strengthening organisational learning, and restoring compassionate, equitable care. The project will help create a culture where staff feel valued and heard, learning is transparent, and every woman and family experiences care that is safe, personal, and kind.
Connection to team...
Across national investigations, the same themes appear: siloed working between obstetrics, midwifery, anaesthesia, and neonatology; inconsistent handovers; and avoidable delays when team members feel unable to speak up. Local CQC findings reflect these issues too—staff reported feeling unheard, discouraged from escalating concerns, or unsure whether their input would lead to action. This contributes to escalation fatigue, a pattern where repeated concerns are raised but not visibly resolved, leading to disengagement and risk.
What we will do:
We will strengthen communication and connection between teams by creating clear, accessible channels for escalation and feedback. Using a combination of digital portals and face-to-face listening spaces, we will ensure that critical insights from frontline staff reach the right decision-makers -whether ward leaders, matrons, or executive teams - and that staff can see how their input drives change.
Through the expansion of existing training in civility and psychological safety, we will embed these principles into day-to-day behaviours—not as one-off workshops or posters, but as consistent expectations and habits. This includes how we challenge one another, how we give and receive feedback, how we recover after conflict, and how we maintain a culture where it feels safe to speak up, even under pressure.
We will also increase the use of hot and cold debriefs. Hot debriefs will offer a short, structured moment immediately after challenging events, giving staff space to acknowledge the emotional load and reflect safely as a team. Cold debriefs will allow for deeper reflection—looking at what happened, what helped or hindered teamwork, and how we can strengthen communication in future.
Finally, we will work with teams to undertake values clarification - a process to re-establish a shared sense of purpose and shared mental models. This work will help us define, together, what “good” looks like in our unit: how we want to speak to one another under pressure, what we expect from team leadership, and how we build trust across disciplines.
By taking these actions, we aim to foster a stronger sense of psychological safety, mutual respect, and team resilience—conditions proven to support both staff wellbeing and patient safety.
Why focus on connection?
We began with a thematic review of national reports from the last ~20 years, extracting recurrent risk patterns and protective factors across the maternity pathway: listening and candour, psychological safety, escalation and decision-making, fetal monitoring proficiency, early recognition of maternal deterioration, equitable access and personalised care, investigation quality, and reliable implementation of evidence-based bundles such as Saving Babies’ Lives. We then cross-walked these themes to our local context by comparing them with the latest CQC findings at Leeds (covering culture, staffing and skill mix, governance, family involvement in reviews, intrapartum monitoring, and flow). This mapping ensured that the Connection Project is not a generic improvement initiative—but a targeted response that focuses on exactly where national lessons and our local data intersect. The four simplified domains in the framework give a clear, shared scaffold that makes the work tangible for staff and immediately meaningful for our service users.
How we built the framework...
Think of someone that you feel connected to - a friend, a child, a colleague. Connection implies that you have an understanding of what is important to that person, what lifts them up, what weighs them down. Connection is rooted in care - a mutual desire for the wellbeing of the other person. This same kind of connection is what helps teams thrive. When we feel seen and supported, we communicate more openly, learn more easily, and care more deeply. We work not just side by side, but together. And when teams feel connected to the people they care for, the result is care that is personal, compassionate, and culturally sensitive.
In the complex, high-stakes environment of maternity services, where the work is both rewarding and hugely demanding, outcomes are shaped as much by how we relate - to ourselves, to each other, to the systems we work within, and to the families we care for - as by the technical care we provide. The four domains of connection offer a simple way to bring more compassion, resilience, and learning into everyday practice - by paying attention to the relationships that make care not just safer, but more human.
Am I connected to myself?
What brings me joy and meaning at work?
How can I contribute to continuous improvement?
Am I burnt out?
How do individual human factors affect me?
Connection to Self...
Maternity teams are caring for women and babies with greater complexity and higher acuity than ever. We are also working inside stretched systems—with persistent workforce gaps, rising demand, and longstanding uncertainty about how best to resource services in line with the staffing–outcomes evidence. Unsurprisingly, many staff are tired or burnt out; some are experiencing moral injury and second-victim effects after difficult events. Over time, top-down, leadership has also blunted motivation and squeezed out the local ingenuity we need on the shop floor.
Against this backdrop, national reviews tell a consistent story: under sustained pressure, services can drift toward overconfidence, tunnel vision, hesitation under stress, delayed escalation, weak listening to women and families, variable fetal monitoring, and investigations that blame rather than learn. By contrast, staff make better decisions when they can regulate stress, surface cognitive biases, and openly discuss options and risks with women—aligned with legal frameworks such as Montgomery.
The Connection Project is our practical answer. We will build continuous feedback loops for staff, offer coaching and peer support, expand human factors training, and - critically - empower frontline teams to foreground the real problems and lead the fixes in their own areas. Frontline staff are often the true experts in local challenges, and enabling them to address these issues helps restore a sense of meaning and purpose. The premise is simple and evidence-aligned: happier, well-supported, and empowered staff provide safer, more reliable, and more compassionate care for families.
Client Testimonials
Our clients have experienced remarkable improvements in staff wellbeing, patient connections, and safety processes through our platform.
Deena Levies, RN
The Connection Project has revolutionized the way we approach cultural improvement in maternity care, leading to enhanced staff collaboration and patient-centered care.
Tom Smithenson, MD
I have witnessed firsthand the positive impact of The Connection Project on staff wellbeing and patient safety, making it an invaluable tool for healthcare organizations.
Tilly Green, Hospital Administrator