Updated 15 November 2023
Pages 1 and 2 of this report relate to the hospital and the ratings of that location, from page 3 the ratings and information relate to maternity services based at George Eliot NHS Hospital.
We inspected the maternity service at George Eliot NHS Hospital as part of our national maternity inspection programme. The programme aims to give an up-to-date view of hospital maternity care across the country and help us understand what is working well to support learning and improvement at a local and national level.
George Eliot NHS Hospital provides maternity services to the population of over 300,000.
Maternity services include an early pregnancy unit, outpatient department, maternity assessment unit, combined antenatal and postnatal ward (Drayton Ward), delivery suite and two maternity theatres. Between April 2022 and March 2023 2,153 babies were born at George Eliot NHS Hospital. We will publish a report of our overall findings when we have completed the national inspection programme.
We carried out an announced focused inspection of the maternity service, looking only at the safe and well-led key questions.
Our rating of this hospital stayed the same. We rated it as Requires Improvement because:
- Our rating of Good for maternity services did not change ratings for the hospital overall. We rated safe as Good and well-led as Good.
Our reports are here: www.cqc.org.uk/location/RLT01
How we carried out the inspection
We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.
We visited the maternity day assessment unit, maternity assessment unit (triage), delivery suite and the antenatal / postnatal (Drayton) ward.
We spoke with 9 midwives, 3 support workers, 9 medical staff, 5 women and birthing people and 1 birthing partner and or relative. We reviewed 5 patient care records, 4 Observation and escalation charts and 10 medicines records. We did not receive any responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.
Following our onsite inspection, we spoke with senior leaders within the service; we also looked at a wide range of documents including standard operating procedures, guidelines, meeting minutes, risk assessments, recent reported incidents as well as audits and action plans. We then used this information to form our judgements.
You can find further information about how we carry out our inspections on our website: https://www.cqc.org.uk/what-we-do/how-we-do-our-job/what-we-do-inspection.