Updated 28 July 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 Saint Mary’s Hospital.
We inspected the maternity service at Saint Mary’s 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.
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.
The inspection was carried out using a pre-inspection data submission and an on-site inspection where we observed the environment, observed care, conducted interviews with patients and staff, reviewed policies, care records, medicines charts and documentation.
Following the site visit, we conducted interviews with senior leaders, specialist staff and stakeholders. We held focus groups for staff of different grades and roles and reviewed feedback from women and families about the trust. We ran a poster campaign during our inspection to encourage women and birthing people who had used the service to give us feedback regarding care. We received feedback from 30 women, birthing people and families and analysed the results to identify themes and trends.
Saint Mary’s Hospital is 1 of 3 sites for maternity services for the trust. It comprises of a central delivery unit with 14 birthing rooms, 1 room with a birthing pool and has adjacent maternity theatres. There are 4 enhanced maternal care rooms within the central delivery suite and induction of labour beds. There are post and antenatal wards, an antenatal assessment unit and maternity day unit. The service has a triage unit with 10 beds. The service also has a fetal medicine unit and a maternal medicine service which provide services to women and birthing people from across Greater Manchester and the Northwest region. Ante and postnatal clinics are also provided at this location.
The local maternity population come from areas of higher levels of deprivation than the national average with 30% in the most deprived decile compared to 14% nationally. A higher proportion of mothers were Asian or Asian British compared to the national averages.
Our rating of this hospital went down. We rated it as requires improvement because:
- Our ratings of the maternity service changed the ratings for the hospital overall. We rated maternity services as inadequate in safe and requires improvement in well-led and the hospital as requires improvement.
We also inspected 2 other maternity services run by Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust. Our reports are here:
Wythenshawe Hospital – https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/R0A07
North Manchester General Hospital – https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/R0A66
Following this inspection, under Section 29A of the Health and Social Care Act 2008, we issued a warning notice to the provider. We took this urgent action as we believed a person would or may be exposed to the risk of harm if we had not done so.
How we carried out the inspection
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.