The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has found improvement in the care being provided in maternity services at Worcestershire Royal Hospital, run by Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, following an inspection in October. This latest inspection sees the rating for maternity services at the hospital improve from requires improvement to good.
The inspection was carried out as part of CQC’s national maternity services inspection programme. This will provide an up-to-date view of the quality of hospital maternity care across the country, and a better understanding of what is working well to support learning and improvement.
As well as maternity services overall at Worcestershire Royal Hospital improving from requires improvement to good, so has how well-led the service is. Safe has again been rated as requires improvement. Effective, caring and responsive were not looked at during this inspection and remain rated as good.
The overall rating for Worcestershire Royal Hospital remains as requires improvement overall.
Carolyn Jenkinson, CQC’s deputy director of secondary and specialist healthcare, said:
“When we visited maternity services at Worcestershire Royal Hospital, staff were working hard to deliver a high standard of care to women, people using the service, and their babies. We found leaders were visible and approachable, they also had the skills and abilities to run the service well and understood and managed the priorities and issues they faced.
“We found the service had good medicines management. Staff followed systems and processes to safely prescribe and administer medicines to people. Staff reviewed each person’s regularly and provided advice to women and people using the service about the medicines they were taking.
“Our inspectors saw that staff kept clear and up to date records of people’s care and treatment, it was stored securely and easily available to all staff providing care. When people using the service transferred to a new team’s care, there were no delays in staff accessing their records which meant they were clear about people’s individual health needs.
“However, there were some areas of concern which needed to be addressed to keep people safe. For example, the service experienced some issues with recruitment and retention and sickness of staff. However, since the inspection the trust has recruited more staff to maintain safe staffing levels.
“Despite finding some issues, staff had worked hard since our previous inspection to improve the quality of care they were delivering to people.
“We’ll continue to monitor the service, including through future inspections, to ensure people continue to receive a good standard of care.”
Inspectors found:
- Staff used equipment and control measures to protect people from infection. They kept equipment and the premises visibly clean
- Leaders and teams had systems in place to identify and escalate relevant risks and issues, manage performance, and produce, action plans to reduce their impact. Although the service had not achieved full compliance with national incentive schemes, they had detailed action plans in place and were making steady progress
- Most staff felt respected, supported, and valued
- The service managed safety incidents well. Staff recognised and reported incidents and near misses. Managers investigated incidents and shared lessons learned with the whole team and the wider service.
However:
- Not all staff had completed training on how to recognise and report abuse and they knew how to apply it
- The service did not always have enough medical staff with the right qualifications, skills, training, and experience to women, people using the service and babies safe from avoidable harm and to provide the right care and treatment.