The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has rated maternity services good at Medway Maritime Hospital, which is run by Medway NHS Foundation Trust, following an inspection in December.
The inspection at the hospital, 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.
This is the first time maternity services at Medway Maritime Hospital have been rated as a standalone core service. Previously, maternity and gynaecology services were inspected and rated together.
As well as the overall rating of good, maternity service have also been rated as good for being safe and well-led. Effective, caring and responsive were not looked at during this inspection therefore remain unrated.
The overall rating for both Medway Maritime Hospital and Medway NHS Foundation Trust remains rated as requires improvement.
Carolyn Jenkinson, CQC’s deputy director of secondary and specialist healthcare, said:
“When we visited maternity services at Medway Maritime Hospital, we found a good service, where staff were focused on the needs of those receiving care, and people could access the service when they needed it.
“Women and people using this service really valued the maternity triage phoneline. The ‘Call The Midwife service provided a 24-hour, seven days a week dedicated telephone helpline, answered by experienced midwives.
“We found some excellent examples of innovative care in training and development which was translating into good outcomes for women, people using the service, and their babies. This included a practice development team who supported midwives allowing the service to have multiple specialist lead midwives. These included specialists in bereavement, diabetes, screening, safeguarding, foetal medicines, foetal wellbeing infant feeding, mental health.
“Their emphasis on training, enabled different teams to work together leading to better outcomes, and staff were given the time and space to attend training and team building off site. This meant their training, which would benefit people using the service, was less likely to be interrupted by being called to perform clinical duties.
“We did however, find some issues with staffing levels caused by sickness, recruitment and retention of staff. While the trust did everything they could to minimise the risk, staffing levels didn’t always match the planned numbers which could put the safety of people using the service and babies at risk.
“However, the trust should be really proud of the care they’re providing to people, and we hope they can continue to build on this. We’ll continue to monitor the service including through future inspections around our other key questions, to ensure women and people using the service continue to receive good care.”
Inspectors found the following:
- Women and people using the service were given choice over the place where they could give birth.
- People using the service were receiving safe care, with risk assessments being completed and updated regularly, and action being taken to remove or minimise risks where they were found.
- The service carried out an internal inspection visit to provide the department reassurance that people using the service had access to safe, effective and personalised care. The visit identified areas for improvement and actions that needed to be taken. An action plan had been developed in response and progress monitored.
- Staff knew how to raise concerns and how to report incidents. There had been no ‘never’ events on any of the maternity wards in the last 12 months. A ‘never event’ is a serious incident that could be prevented.