The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has told Airedale NHS Foundation Trust it needs to improve maternity care at Airedale General Hospital, following an inspection in December.
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.
Following this inspection, the overall rating for maternity services has declined from good to requires improvement. It has also dropped from good to requires improvement for being safe and well-led. Effective, caring and responsive were not looked at during this inspection and remain rated as good.
The overall rating for Airedale General Hospital remains rated as requires improvement.
Carolyn Jenkinson, CQC’s deputy director of secondary and specialist healthcare, said:
“When we visited maternity services at Airedale General Hospital, we found staff were focused on the needs of people in their care, however staffing shortages had impacted on their morale as they felt they couldn’t always give women and people using the service the standard of care they needed.
“We found improvements were needed around safety. For example, the maternity assessment centre had no clear system in place to prioritise and risk assess people to ensure they were treated in a timely way.
“The trust leadership team know where improvements are needed and we will continue to monitor the service, including through future inspections, to ensure people are receiving the high standard of care they deserve.”
Inspectors found the following:
- The service was unable to evidence some mandatory training figures, including levels of appropriate safeguarding adults training or competency checks in medicines management
- There were gaps in sharing safeguarding information during handovers
- Policies and documentation were not always kept up to date, and audits were not always completed in line with trust targets. Action plans were not always completed or updated in a timely way.
However:
- Staff worked well together for the benefit of women and people using the service and understood how to protect them from abuse
- The service managed safety incidents well and learned lessons from them
- Staff felt respected, supported, and valued and were focused on the needs of people using the service.