Updated 20 March 2024
This report relates to the ratings and information for maternity services based at Stroud Maternity Unit. Stroud Maternity Unit (SMU) is a standalone unit run by a team of midwives who provided care to women and birthing people with low risk pregnancies in Stroud and the surrounding areas. Any necessary transfers were made to the consultant led unit at Gloucesteshire Royal Hospital, which was 11.5 miles away.
We inspected the maternity service at SMU 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.
Stroud Maternity Unit (SMU) includes a birth centre, antenatal clinic, and conservatory area where additional support services were provided.
We will publish a report of our overall findings when we have completed the national inspection programme.
We carried out a short notice announced, focused inspection of the maternity service, looking only at the safe and well-led key questions.
This location was last inspected under the maternity and gynaecology framework in 2015. Following a consultation process CQC split the assessment of maternity and gynaecology in 2018. As such the historical maternity and gynaecology rating is not comparable to the current maternity inspection and is therefore retired. This means that the resulting rating for Safe and Well-led from this inspection will be the first rating of maternity services for the location. This does not affect the overall Trust level rating.
We rated Stroud Maternity Unit as Requires Improvement:
How we carried out the inspection
We provided the service with 3 working days’ notice of our inspection.
We visited the antenatal clinic, the birth centre, and the closed postnatal bay.
We spoke with the consultant midwife, 1 matron, 4 midwives, 1 maternity support worker, and 1 student midwife. We were unable to speak with any women and birthing people. We received 2 responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.
We reviewed 5 patient care records and 5 observation and escalation charts.
Following our onsite inspection, we spoke with senior leaders within the service, the maternity safety champions and the Maternity and Neonatal Voice Partnership. 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.