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Impact Report
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Andrew Darby-Smith

Andrew Darby-Smith

Upskill.Health
Upskill delivers bite-sized, mobile training for busy NHS maternity staff in order to amplify women’s lived experience and learning from safety investigations to improve maternity safety.

Dr Andrew Darby-Smith is an NHS Anaesthetist and Founder of Upskill.Health. Working in NHS maternity services, he saw how barriers to on-the-job training undermined safety by limiting individual development, as well as slowing system learning following adverse events. But, with 10 years’ experience in medical education at Imperial College London, he also saw an opportunity to apply new technologies and educational best practice to help solve this problem.

After joining NHS England’s Clinical Entrepreneur Programme, Andrew founded Upskill.Health in 2024 and went on to secure multiple Innovate UK grants, as well as support from Digital Health.London and Health Innovation Network ‘Accelerating Femtech’ programme.

By focusing on ‘bitesize’, mobile learning that is co-designed with real women sharing their lived experience as ‘case studies’, NHS staff can now upskill in a way that fits around clinical workloads, promotes connection to their local communities, and encourages the clinical attitudes and behaviours needed to deliver the best care.

From 2026, Upskill will also collaborate with ‘Maternity and Neonatal Safety Investigations’ (MNSI) to help transform real-world safety investigations into scalable training that can accelerate system-wide learning for safer maternity care across the country.