Next week I celebrate my one year anniversary of being Chief Executive at Queen’s and King George hospitals, so I thought I’d share with you some thoughts about what I have been most proud of since I arrived – a question I was asked during my recent twitter chat.

I am always proud when I hear from patients and staff about excellent care that their friends or families have received. I was especially proud when I read recently about the amazing care our midwives provide in our birth centre in the Romford Recorder. Why was I so proud of this?

The recent report into the failings in maternity care at Furness General Hospital caused me to reflect on our own journey of improvement in maternity. The report found that there were “at least seven missed opportunities at almost every level” in the organisation which meant poor clinical care was not investigated, leading to the preventable deaths of one mother and 11 babies.

The Kirkup report resonated with the journey that our organisation has undertaken to improve our maternity services – and leads me to ask the questions; how did we overcome these challenges and how do we ensure we continue to provide safe and compassionate services that women recommend to their friends and families?

For several years our organisation had struggled to reform maternity services and to provide consistently safe care for women and their families – despite complaints from our patients. In 2011 a damning Care Quality Commission inspection report resulted in restrictions being applied to the services we provided, quickly followed by a campaign led by passionate local women who called for improvements and the topic being raised in the House of Commons. This scrutiny and external focus was a turning point for our maternity services.

A plan for improvement was implemented, our maternity services were centralised onto one site, a cap on the number of births was put in place and we invested in quality, governance and good leadership. In 2013 an external review found that improvements had been made and sustained and last summer our local Healthwatch organisations also praised our services. 99% of women would now recommend our services to their friends and family. I am extremely proud of our midwives, maternity care assistants and obstetrics teams who have been part of this journey of improvement. These aren’t systems or processes, these are all individuals who have reflected on their own role, that of their team and how they work with their colleagues and they now listen to patients to improve. Asking themselves the question what can I do differently, what can the team do differently and what do we need from others?

What else do I think this journey tells me?

Working in the NHS we must listen and believe that we can learn and improve. We must ensure that we embrace openness and scrutiny earlier, we must listen to our patients and our frontline staff earlier so that we are able to identify triggers and take action earlier to keep our patients safe. We ignore the voice of our people and our patients at our peril as the reports into mid Staffordshire and Kirkup demonstrate so starkly.

Our maternity journey also helps us to acknowledge the broad network of individuals and organisations that need to work together to improve – the role our staff play, our patients, their families, elected representatives, regulators, government and the media. We all have a role in helping to drive improvement, to be persistent and provide pace that facilitates change. The transformation of our maternity services demonstrates that we can work together to achieve something that is better.