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Teamwork, leadership and collaboration: driving perinatal improvement across south London

Published by Ismar Uzeirovic
An image showing baby's feet

On 14 October 2025, Hebe Davies-Colley, MatNeo Programme Lead, and Zoe Taylor, Project Manager, with planning support from Karen Ang, Senior QI Project Manager, facilitated one of the sessions for the Q community’s maternity improvement series to share how collaborative, data-driven support is helping teams embed safer perinatal care across south London.

Why perinatal improvement matters

 

While pregnancy and birth are positive experiences for many, quality of care still varies across England. Maternity and neonatal services remain a national priority, with independent investigations and rising litigation underscoring the need for consistent, high-quality care.

 

In 2023–24, 41 per cent of NHS Resolution compensation payments related to maternity claims, totalling around £1.15 billion. In response, NHS England has commissioned a range of patient safety programmes, including the Perinatal Optimisation Pathway (POP), which aims to reduce mortality and brain injury in babies born before 34 weeks.

 

Our role at the HIN

 

The Health Innovation Network South London supports sustainable quality improvement by working with clinical teams in trusts, local maternity and neonatal systems (LMNS), and integrated care boards (ICBs). We help teams turn national priorities into practical, local change - from clarifying aims and measures to building the conditions for lasting improvement.

 

Engaging stakeholders and building trust

Drawing on our work with south London teams, we shared practical stakeholder engagement strategies that help improvement gain traction, build trust and maintain momentum. These strategies include:

 

  • understanding national and local priorities, including maternity incentive scheme requirements;
  • building psychological safety and trust so teams feel supported, not judged;
  • using data and patient stories together to show impact; and
  • aligning work with existing meetings and structures to reduce burden.


We also stressed the value of identifying local champions and tailoring support to each team’s context, pace and priorities so that change is owned locally and sustained over time.

Making improvement sustainable

 

Sustainability is at the heart of our approach. From the outset, we plan for changes to become part of everyday practice so that benefits continue beyond the initial project. That means:

 

  • providing practical support such as clear action tracking;
  • celebrating success and sharing learning across trusts;
  • avoiding reliance on short-term roles or unsustainable processes; and
  • coaching teams to develop their own solutions and internal capability.

 

We also protect the goodwill of our clinical partners by being mindful of their time and priorities, ensuring that improvement work adds value rather than extra pressure.

Impact and outcomes

 

The results of this collaborative approach are encouraging. Since late 2022, south London has seen a marked rise in preterm babies receiving all eligible interventions, with compliance now consistently above the national average.

As of December 2024, across the London region:

 

  • 92 per cent of eligible women received magnesium sulphate, an intervention associated with reduced cerebral palsy risk - an estimated 61 cases potentially prevented;
  • this equates to an estimated £61 million cost saving to the NHS and wider society;

more than 282 lives may have been saved across London over six years through full pathway implementation.

 

“Always good to connect with fellow improvers, and interesting to learn more about your perinatal optimisation work. Thank you.”

“Thank you. Very interesting session and good to hear what is going on elsewhere.”

“Enjoyed hearing about the work and the discussion. Thank you.”

Conclusion

Improvement work is challenging and, at the same time, lifesaving. By fostering a culture of collaboration, trust and shared learning, we can continue to improve outcomes for babies and families across south London. Thank you to the Q community for the opportunity to share our journey, and to the dedicated professionals driving this work every day.

Get in touch

If you’d like support to strengthen perinatal optimisation in your organisation, contact the HIN maternity and neonatal team.

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Driving sustainable innovation at scale in health systems

Published by Ismar Uzeirovic
St George's Hospital Exterior With London Red Bus In Foreground
Reflections from a recent collaboration between IBM, NHS South West London Integrated Care Board and the Health Innovation Network South London

Health systems today face a difficult balance: delivering better care with fewer resources, while also driving forward innovation that is meaningful and lasting.

As part of the Health Foundation’s Accelerating Innovation Systems programme, a team led by Dr John Byrne, Director of Innovation & Research at NHS South West London Integrated Care Board (SWL ICB) and colleagues, alongside the Health Innovation Network South London (HIN) recently had the privilege of visiting IBM in their Innovation Studio. This visit aimed to explore how innovation can become a more integrated, strategic function, rather than something that lives on the margins.


IBM do not set out to try and provide all the answers to the many questions and challenges related to innovation themselves. Rather, they aim to be a trusted partner, bringing cross-sector insight, practical frameworks, and a collaborative approach to help health systems test, scale, and sustain innovation in ways that are appropriate to their context.

Embedding Innovation as a System Capability

The day  focused on a key challenge: how to move beyond isolated pilots and embed innovation more deeply into the day-to-day fabric of health and care systems. This is always a challenge in the NHS, where the current focus is on adoption and scaling of proven innovations so more patients benefit. Some of the key areas we explored included:

 

1. Innovation as a cultural operating model

 

Rather than viewing innovation as a separate function, we looked at how health systems can make it part of their cultural infrastructure.

We examined how large, regulated organisations embed innovation as a continuous process, supported by:

  • Leadership commitment and cultural alignment;
  • Upskilling and capability-building across teams;
  • New ways of working that encourage experimentation and rapid feedback loops.

For health systems, this means fostering a mindset where innovation is everyone’s responsibility, not just the remit of a single team.

2. Moving from pilots to scaled impact

 

Too often, promising pilots stall before reaching scale. We explored barriers such as short-term funding cycles, siloed infrastructure, and unclear adoption pathways and discussed what it takes to move from experimentation to sustained change.

Key enablers include:

  • Enterprise architecture alignment: ensuring innovations fit within broader system design;
  • Flexible platforms: avoiding isolated point solutions in favour of interoperable, scalable technologies;
  • Built-in adoption pathways: co-designing with end users and stakeholders from the outset.

For the NHS, this means cultivating the right culture, capabilities, and partnerships alongside robust co-production practices to ensure innovations are not only tested but embedded.

 

In practice: transforming patient engagement at one of the UK’s largest NHS trusts

Faced with outdated systems and a reliance on manual processes, a major NHS trust partnered with IBM to modernise its patient engagement channels. The goal: improve patient experience and reduce administrative burden.

Using IBM Garage, Celonis process mining, and advanced data analytics, over 500,000 pseudonymised patient journeys were analysed. This rapid, equity-focused approach uncovered actionable insights in weeks. IBM watsonx.ai was also piloted to support backlog management by reading clinical letters and verifying waiting list statuses using GenAI.

The impact?

  • Over 700 more patients seen weekly without increasing staff;
  • Up to 15% reduction in backlog;
  • DNA rates dropped from 10% to 4% with smarter SMS reminders;
  • AI reviewed clinic letters in 18 hours versus 4 years for manual review.

This collaboration showcases how data-driven innovation can deliver meaningful improvements in NHS outpatient care.

 

3. Using data and AI to identify where to innovate

 

With resources under pressure and ICBs evolving as strategic commissioners, it’s vital to focus innovation where it delivers the greatest impact. We explored how data and AI can help identify these opportunities.

Examples included:

  • Process mining: uncovering inefficiencies, variation, and redesign opportunities across care pathways;
  • Digital twins: simulating system changes before committing to large-scale implementation;
  • Outcome-driven AI investment: prioritising use cases like reducing missed appointments, enabling intelligent triage, and improving population health management.

These tools offer a way to shift from reactive problem-solving to proactive system design aligned with the NHS’s long-term priorities of prevention, community-based care, and digital transformation.

 

4. Scaling innovation in resource-constrained settings

 

Drawing lessons from sectors like finance, logistics, and telecoms, we explored how large organisations scale automation and AI even in constrained environments.

IBM shared examples of:

  • Ambient documentation: reducing clinician burden through voice-enabled note-taking;
  • Predictive rostering: optimising workforce planning using AI;
  • Smart referrals: streamlining patient pathways with intelligent triage.

We also discussed the importance of ethical governance, ensuring AI deployment in public health systems is transparent, equitable, and accountable.

 

5. Building sustainable innovation ecosystems

 

Finally, we explored the NHS not just as a provider, but as a platform for innovation; one that enables collaboration across academia, startups, and industry.

We looked at what it takes to build an “innovation supply chain,” including:

  • Open data and APIs to foster interoperability;
  • Sandboxes for safe experimentation;
  • Procurement models that support co-development and shared risk.

This ecosystem approach is essential for unlocking the full potential of innovation especially in a system as complex and interdependent as the NHS.


Closing reflections

“Healthcare innovation can often feel overwhelmingly difficult, particularly within the complexity of the NHS. The need for initiatives like the Health Foundation’s Accelerating Innovation Systems programme is proof that there’s still a long way to go in ensuring health and care innovation projects consistently deliver against their ambitions.

Collaboration is absolutely critical for helping us to identify and embed the factors that make innovation easier. That means not just looking within the NHS for inspiration, but also enlisting the help of industry partners and looking for similarities in other sectors facing the same challenges.” Dr John Byrne, SWL ICB Director of Innovation and Research

Innovation in health systems isn’t just about new technology, it is about creating the conditions for ongoing change, even in challenging times. The collaboration between IBM, SWL ICB, and the HIN was a valuable opportunity to reflect, learn, and co-create new approaches to sustainable innovation.

If you're exploring similar challenges or simply want a space to think out loud about embedding innovation more deeply – please do get in touch with us.


Want to dive deeper into the concepts discussed here?


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