St Mary's Hospital

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 St Mary’s Hospital

We inspected the Portsmouth Maternity Centre at St 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.

Portsmouth Maternity Centre is located on the second floor of St Mary’s Hospital provides maternity services to the population of Portsmouth, Southsea, Havant and the surrounding areas.

Maternity services at St Mary’s Hospital include antenatal, intrapartum (care during labour and delivery) and postnatal maternity care. The service has six clinic rooms and two delivery rooms with ensuite facilities and one with a birthing pool.

Portsmouth Maternity Centre is open 8am to 8pm Monday to Friday and 8am to 5pm at the weekend for antenatal and postnatal clinics. Out of these hours, care is provided to women and birthing people on an on-call basis.

Intrapartum care activity levels at Portsmouth Maternity Centre were low. Between October 2022 and October 2023, 10 babies were born at St Mary’s Hospital. There were no births at the Portsmouth Maternity Centre in November 2022 and February, April, May, June, August 2023.

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.

We had not previously inspected maternity services St Mary’s Hospital.

We also inspected 2 other maternity services run by Portsmouth University Hospitals NHS Trust.

Our reports are here:

• Queen Alexandra Hospital - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RHU03
• Gosport War Memorial Hospital - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RHU10

How we carried out the inspection

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

We visited the birthing and clinic rooms.

We spoke with 3 midwives, including the birth centre lead midwife.

We reviewed 3 patient care 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 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.