Attendees at your meeting may come from a wide range of backgrounds and not all of them will be familiar with NHS structures or jargon. Staff members may not have attended a Maternity Voices Partnership (MVP) meeting before. Consider circulating some introductory information that will enable people to prepare. For example you could include:
- An introduction to the organisations involved in your local maternity system and how the MVP fits into this
- Your draft MVP terms of reference, which should include the purpose and ways of functioning for the MVP
- Roles and specifications for MVP chair and members (in addition to the chair role description, there is a clinical MVP rep role description on the National Maternity Voices web site)
- Names and contact details of any key link people or secretariat staff for the MVP
- Names and roles of core MVP members (e.g. your head of midwifery, lead obstetrician, maternity commissioner, etc)
- Annual report from any previous MVP that may have existed in this location (if you are relaunching your MVP after a hiatus)
- The Seven Principles of Public Life (known as the “Nolan Principles”), which all MVP members should be guided by
- Expense claim forms for service users
In addition, you may wish to offer service-user members a tour of the maternity unit as this can have multiple benefits:
- New service user members can familiarise themselves with the service
- Fresh eyes may be able to identify some immediate areas for improvement
- You can invite service user members to volunteer for Walk the Patch (see section 4.4) and/or the 15 Steps for Maternity (see section 3.13).
We’d like to link to some examples of new member information packs here. Does your MVP have examples that are working well in your locality? If you’d be happy for this to be shared in the final version of the toolkit, please send it to hannah@nationalmaternityvoices.org.uk. Please say if you would prefer your resource to be anonymised. Thank you