Updated 15 March 2024
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 Tameside General Hospital.
We inspected the maternity service at Tameside General 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.
Tameside General Hospital provides maternity services to the population of Tameside and Glossop.
Maternity services include an outpatient department, midwifery led birthing centre (Acorn Birth Centre), central delivery suite, 1 maternity theatre, maternity ward (ward 27) with induction of labour suite and transitional care and a day assessment unit. Between December 2022 and November 2023, 2,104 babies were born at Tameside General Hospital.
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.
Our rating of this hospital stayed the same. We rated it as Good because:
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Our rating of Requires Improvement for maternity services did not change ratings for the hospital overall. We rated safe and well-led as Good.
How we carried out the inspection
We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.
We visited the central delivery suite, main theatres, ward 27 maternity ward and the day assessment unit, which included maternity triage.
We spoke with 12 midwives, 1 support worker, 7 doctors, theatre staff, 4 women and birthing people and 4 birthing partners and or relatives. We received 216 responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.
We reviewed 10 patient care records, 4 Observation and escalation charts and 10 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 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.