Not another survey
No tick boxes standing in for what people actually think.
A national Safe Space
Your VoiceA national conversation about maternity and neonatal improvement
Helping the people closest to maternity and neonatal services to build a better future for maternity and neonatal care.
Open to midwives, nurses, doctors, maternity support workers, neonatal teams, leaders, families and partners.
Supporting the national maternity and neonatal improvement programme.
Independently provided and analysed by Clever Together.
The reviews are clear
It’s time to put them into action.
Now staff who know maternity and neonatal care best need to help shape the future and how we deliver it together.
Clever Together is proud to support a national programme to create a large-scale, open and structured conversation about the future improvement of maternity and neonatal services.
Our role is clear: to create a safe, credible and independent space in which people can speak, listen, learn and contribute to improvement.
Why this matters
No single organisation can see all of it.
Maternity and neonatal services contain extraordinary expertise and commitment — experience and knowledge that is distributed across our nation. It sits with midwives, nurses, doctors, maternity support workers, neonatal teams, leaders, families, partners and many others whose experiences reveal different parts of the system. No single organisation or leadership team or person can see all of it.
Clever Together is proud to be providing a national online Safe Space designed to bring the knowledge of the NHS workforce together.
Not another consultation
No predetermined proposition waiting for a response.
A structured conversation
An opportunity to explore experience, understand one another’s perspectives and identify how the recommendations from the Amos Review can be taken into action.
Our commitment to independence
Your voice belongs to you.
Clever Together is responsible for providing and supporting the Safe Space and for helping make sense of what emerges through it. We take this responsibility seriously.
Our job is not to manufacture agreement, defend an organisation or steer participants towards a predetermined conclusion. Our responsibility is to create a process in which people can contribute safely and meaningfully, and in which the resulting evidence is analysed with integrity.
We will:
- be transparent about how contributions are used;
- be clear in how analysis is undertaken;
- be direct about where our responsibilities begin and end;
- report what the conversation reveals — including difference, challenge and uncomfortable findings where they are present.
Independence does not mean being distant from the work — it is part of how we protect its credibility.
From national conversation to local and national improvement
Listening matters most when something happens afterwards.
The national conversation is intended to contribute to improvement, not merely produce another body of evidence.
What emerges can help leaders understand
- 01 what people experience now
- 02 what is helping services succeed
- 03 where people encounter persistent barriers
- 04 what professionals and families believe needs to change
- 05 where experience differs between people, professions and places
- 06 what ideas deserve further development
- 07 what national and local leaders may need to do differently
Trust-level reports
We will produce trust-level reports to support local implementation.
National implementation intelligence
Aggregated data will help inform the National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce’s action plan — providing ideas and insight for the Modern Service Framework, so future decisions are grounded in the realities of staff, services and the families they serve.
The ultimate test
It is not how many people participate.
It is whether better knowledge contributes to better decisions, stronger improvement and better experiences for women, babies, families and the people who care for them.
The national programme
A national conversation, convened nationally.
Your Voice supports the national maternity and neonatal improvement programme, led by NHS England’s national clinical leadership and overseen by the National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce.
Clever Together’s role sits alongside that leadership rather than inside it: we provide the Safe Space, support the people using it, and analyse and report what emerges — independently.
Duncan Burton
Chief Nursing Officer for England
Kate Brintworth
Chief Midwifery Officer for England
Frankie Swords
National Medical Director, NHS England
Separate from the national programme
An opportunity to continue using this approach
Turn a national improvement movement into local capability.
Your Voice, as a national Safe Space for maternity and neonatal care, will close in October. Yet the need to listen, learn and improve with colleagues in each NHS Trust will not end.
Maternity and neonatal leaders can use their own Safe Spaces to continue the approach locally: involving colleagues and families in understanding problems, designing improvements, testing emerging proposals and learning whether change is working.
Your organisation can use Safe Spaces for:
Exploration
Understand an issue deeply before deciding how to solve it.
Co-design
Develop improvements with the people who deliver and experience services.
Check, challenge and enhance
Test emerging proposals with colleagues and families while there is still time to improve them.
Continuous improvement
Create an ongoing infrastructure through which people can contribute ideas, experience and learning as services change.
A special offer for maternity and neonatal services
Build on the national movement in your own organisation.
For a limited period, we are making Safe Spaces available to participating maternity and neonatal services at a specially discounted licence price.
This provides your organisation with its own Safe Space licence, separate from the national programme, which can be used to continue improvement conversations with your workforce, women, families and partners.
The offer is intended particularly for:
- Chief Nurses
- Chief Midwifery Officers / Directors of Midwifery
- Heads of Midwifery
- Maternity and Neonatal Leadership Teams
- Improvement Leaders
A clear firewall. Your local licence is entirely separate from participation in the national programme.
There is no requirement to purchase anything from Clever Together as a consequence of participating in the national work, and purchasing a licence has no bearing whatsoever on the national programme or its findings.
The legacy
From one national conversation to thousands of local opportunities to improve.
Insight is a powerful legacy from a national conversation. Stronger still would be building local capability to keep listening, learning and improving long after the national programme has finished.
That’s what we’d like to help build with anyone who’s interested.