The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has published reports for two maternity services provided by Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, following inspections in March.
The services at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital and St Mary's Hospital were inspected 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 focused inspection, the overall rating for the maternity services at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital remains as outstanding, and how well-led and safe the service is also remains good. This inspection didn’t look at the other domains, effective remains rated as good and caring and responsive remain rated as outstanding. The overall hospital rating remains unchanged as outstanding.
The overall rating for maternity at St Mary's Hospital remains as outstanding. How well-led and safe the service is remains as good. This inspection didn’t look at the other domains, effective remains rated as good and caring and responsive remain rated as outstanding. The overall rating for St Mary’s Hospital remains unchanged as requires improvement.
CQC’s overall rating for Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is unchanged by this inspection and remains rated requires improvement overall.
Carolyn Jenkinson, CQC deputy director of secondary and specialist care, said:
“We found a culture at both hospitals where people were generally receiving good care and staff were positive about the service and their managers.
"We saw that the trust provided a 24-hour helpline where women and people using their services, could access information and be re-routed into the correct department if needed, as well as access specialist mental health support.
“We also saw that leaders had the skills and abilities to help staff meet people’s needs, however we did see some safety issues at St Mary’s Hospital which we have told the trust they need to address.
“We’ve reported our findings to the trust leadership team, so it knows what it needs to do to address these areas, and further build on some of the great care that is already being delivered across both hospitals.”
“We continue to monitor the service, including through future inspections, to ensure the trust are addressing the safety issues in our report.”
Inspectors found:
- Staff worked well together for the benefit of people using services
- Staff were focused on the needs of people receiving care
- Staff engaged well with the community to plan and manage services so that people could access the service when they needed it and did not have to wait too long for treatment
- The leaders had acted to provide sufficient staffing to ensure safe care for people using the service.
However, inspectors also found
- At St Mary’s, there was an inconsistent approach to the recording of people’s risk assessments and prioritisation of their care in triage. However, this was responded to immediately by the trust who put in place new guidelines and processes
- There were some gaps in the daily checking of resuscitaires in the birthing centre at Queen Charlottes and Chelsea Hospital. Staff told inspectors this was because some rooms had been used for postnatal women overnight and regular audits would be put in place to make sure that this practice changes,