Clacton Maternity Unit

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 Clacton Maternity Unit.

We inspected the maternity service at Clacton Maternity Unit 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.

Clacton Maternity Unit serves the population of Clacton-On-Sea which is a coastal town and part of the East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust. The Clacton Maternity Unit has been serving the local community for 40 years. Clacton Maternity Unit is situated 18 miles from Colchester Hospital maternity services which include acute maternity services.

The Clacton Maternity Unit provides care for women and pregnant people who live with complex social needs in an area of social deprivation and is a valuable access point for those women, people and families who may struggle to access care at the main hospital site. The maternity unit serves areas of the Tendering district, which includes some of the most deprived neighbourhoods of Essex. These include a neighbourhood east of Jaywick, a small seaside town which has been ranked as the most deprived neighbourhood nationally in the three most recent indexes of Multiple Deprivation (2010, 2015 and 2019). The index of Multiple Deprivation is a measure of relative deprivation for small areas published by the government.

Maternity services include a standalone birth centre. The birth centre is open ‘on demand’ for local low risk women and birthing people. Other services provided at the location are antenatal appointments, twice weekly consultant led antenatal clinics for high-risk women who live in the area, ultrasound scanning, antenatal education classes, postnatal clinics, vaccinations, and newborn hearing screens. From April 2022 to March 2023 there were 17 babies born at the unit.

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.

We have not rated this location before. This service was registered with CQC on 17 December 2018, and this is their first inspection. East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust was formed 1 July 2018 following the merger of Colchester Hospital University Foundation Trust and Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust. There are maternity services located at both hospital sites and the trust also covers the ‘standalone’ Clacton Maternity Unit.

Our rating of this hospital is rated as Good. Because we have now rated maternity services.

East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust have maternity services at two other locations. Our reports for these locations are here:

Colchester General Hospital - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RDEE4

The Ipswich Hospital - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RDEX1

How we carried out the inspection

We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.

We visited Clacton Maternity Unit on the 26th of July 2023. We spoke with 8 midwives, 2 support workers, 1 woman her partner. We received 3 responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.

We reviewed 6 patient care records, 6 Observation and escalation charts and 6 medicines records.

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 action plans. We then used this information to form our judgement.

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.