Updated 11 August 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 Princess Anne Hospital.
We inspected the maternity service at Princess Anne 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.
Princess Anne Hospital provides maternity care and treatment to women, birthing people and babies from Southampton and surrounding areas, as well as providing more complex maternity and neonatal care to others from the Local Maternity and Neonatal System (LMNS). The LMNS covers Southampton, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth. Staff at the hospital delivered 5220 babies between April 2021 and March 2022 and there were 480 births in April 2023.
Maternity services at Princess Anne Hospital includes an obstetric consultant-led delivery suite, maternity assessment unit (triage) and wards for antenatal and postnatal care. Broadlands Birth Centre, a midwifery-led birth centre, provides intrapartum care for women and birthing people who meet the criteria and are assessed to have lower risk pregnancies.
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 did not review the rating of the location therefore our rating of this hospital stayed the same, Princess Anne Hospital is rated good.
We did not inspect the other service run by University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, the New Forest Birth Centre, as it is currently dormant for delivery of babies.
How we carried out the inspection
During the inspection we spoke with 23 staff including the chief nursing officer, director of midwifery, head of midwifery, obstetricians, doctors and midwives, the non-executive safety champion and the Maternity Voices Partnership chair. We attended handover meetings, reviewed 8 records and spoke with 2 women or birthing people and families.
We received over 300 'give feedback on care' forms through our website from women and birthing people, of which about a quarter were positive. A quarter were negative and about half of all responses included mixed feedback about their experience.
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.