Care Quality Commission Maternity Services Report
Director of Maternity Services, Sue Wilkins said:
“The Care Quality Commission visited our maternity services in September 2022 as part of their national maternity inspection programme. This programme aims to give the inspectors an up-to-date view of hospital maternity care and help them understand what is working well to support learning and improvement at a local and national level.
“They have rated maternity services at Derriford Hospital as ‘Requires Improvement’. This represents a reduction from the previous rating of ‘Good’ that our maternity service held.
However, the CQC noted good practice, in particular that they saw staff were doing their best to provide good care and keep people safe, and people could access the service when they needed it. They also reported finding good collaboration between staff for the benefit of parents and babies, that staff managed infection risks well and were committed to driving improvement.
“The CQC’s principal concerns were around the service not having enough staff, risk assessment of people when attending maternity triage and risks of documentation being incomplete before the implementation of a new IT system.
We are confident when the CQC next visit, we can assure them that we are indeed a ‘Good’ service because a number of things have changed since the September 2022 visit, in particular:
- We didn’t have planned additional maternity staff in place at the time of the inspection; we have 14 more midwives in post now compared to when the CQC visited. We are also delighted to say we now have additional funding to welcome 16 more colleagues over the coming months.
- Our plans for implementing a risk assessment system for women coming into triage were not fully formed but are now. This is due to be implemented in the next few weeks, along with our new IT system later in the summer. These two factors will address many of the CQC’s concerns.
“Our staff work extremely hard to provide good care to families and will continue to do this, with the improvements described above either now already made or about to be in the coming weeks. We always welcome feedback and comments from families using our maternity service and use their feedback to help drive a process of continual improvement.”
