Our Values
Our Values
Insight: We show you how to meet your challenges and how to explore the path you need to be following.
Prevention: We work to prevent problems wherever we can, protecting the communities we live in, helping us all build a healthier, more equal world.
Compassion: We bring compassion and support to everything we do, for you and the people you serve.
Fighting Inequalities in the CDR Landscape
We are proactively anti-racist, disability-confident, queer and trans-inclusive and class-conscious within our organisation and in our work, recognising and tackling the systemic health disparities affecting our most socially vulnerable groups in a holistic manner. All our efforts are dedicated to the bereaved and the memories of deceased.
Currently, CDR is known to be underfunded, undervalued, riddled with health disparities, lacking, and not responsive enough to children, family, and professional needs. To improve our care systems, we must make CDR systems more cohesive and robust, tracking impacts, reporting and briefing issues and trends. Above all, we must centre the children, parents, carers and communities we are here to serve.
We are dedicated to, and proud of our professional practice communities. We are always grateful and humbled by the front-line CDR practitioners, organisations and partners we work with. Without them, CDR system work simply would not be possible. We are committed to improving their working conditions, work culture, provisions of services, resources, and knowledge sharing systems. We are driven to learn from each other, building respectful, mutualistic, sustainable spaces for insight.
Our goal to drive down inequalities not only concerns issues of social gradient and deprivation health disparities in our communities, but also encompasses the fight against unhelpful hierarchies within clinical and social care-led systems. These systems need to provide a space of respect, trust, cultural competence and equity, where practitioners feel safe, comfortable and encouraged to engage with professional curiosity and proportionate challenge in a constructive way. Unconscious biases, seniority hierarchies, and medical biases are an obstacle to this.
We know that the health inequality gap has grown between wealthy and deprived areas over the past decade (1), worsening existing inequalities in health outcomes for Black, Black British, Asian, and Asian British Pakistani families in particular (2) (3). Maternal health and the development of the foetus and baby are strongly influenced by the social, economic, and environmental circumstances that surround them. These social determinants of health mark the quality of health outcomes from birth until death. Our reality is one where 1 in 4 infant deaths could potentially be avoided if all families lived with the lowest level of deprivation (4). In England alone, there are 3500 child deaths annually, with around one - third from acute or chronic medical conditions, malignancy, congenital abnormalities or genetic disease illnesses5.
We are passionate about working for a reality where this doesn’t have to be the case.
Knowing that community needs are dynamic, we strive for adaptability and responsiveness in our own work, contributing to a bereavement-aware and supportive culture in local service providers and communities alike.
Our Values in Practice
Our values are aligned with those of CDR statutory guidance and government reports. We stand for our duty of care, transparency and accountability. We are curious and critical of how CDR currently works, and how it doesn’t, knowing that front-line practitioners and bereaved families are the most impacted by this.
In our current CDR landscape, we support local health, social care and education partnerships in understanding how to best meet and care for their communities’ needs. We work to improve data-sharing between CDR partners, improving learning and transparency within CDR work. By helping healthcare professionals and system adapt for CDR compliance, we act on and improve accountability work culture constructively.
Further putting values into practice, we are consistently engaged with CDR functions, CDRM and CDOP across England, consolidating case learning for future prevention in collaboration with a broad range of CDR professionals.
Led by compassion, we are respectful, culturally competent, empathetic and hopeful, dedicated to ensuring the best care and protecting the paramountcy of each infant, child and young person. Our focus on driving down inequalities reflects this. Further, we listen to healthcare professionals’, parent, carer, and family concerns, working towards a constructive and co-creative CDR workplace.
Prevention is at the heart of our 2+ decades of work in CDR processes, public health service management, development, commissioning and delivery. Our work ranges across different health agendas within CDR, spreading our preventive focus over a variety of CDR agendas.
Our insight is never ours alone; we have a trusted practice of working alongside NHS clinical services, Social Care, Police, Medical Examiners, and Coronial colleagues to develop and support local CDR systems and Safeguarding Boards. We are committed to helping and learning from each other.
To find out more about our work, click here.
(1) https://www.instituteofhealthequity.org/resources-reports/marmot-review-10-years-on
(4) https://www.instituteofhealthequity.org/resources-reports/marmot-review-10-years-on
(5) https://www.ncmd.info/publications/child-death-data-2023/