Seven features of safety in maternity units: a framework based on multisite ethnography and stakeholder consultation

摘要

Reducing avoidable harm in maternity services is a priority globally. As well as learning from mistakes, it is important to produce rigorous descriptions of ‘what good looks like’.We aimed to characterise features of safety in maternity units and to generate a plain language framework that could be used to guide learning and improvement.We conducted a multisite ethnography involving 401?hours of non-participant observations 33 semistructured interviews with staff across six maternity units, and a stakeholder consultation involving 65 semistructured telephone interviews and one focus group.We identified seven features of safety in maternity units and summarised them into a framework, named This large qualitative study has enabled the generation of a new plain language framework—For Us—that identifies the behaviours and practices that appear to be features of safe care in hospital-based maternity units.