11 October 2023
During an inspection looking at part of the service
Pages 1 to 3 of this report relate to the hospital and the ratings of that location, from page 4 the ratings and information relate to maternity services based at Kettering General Hospital.
We inspected the maternity service at Kettering 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.
The Kettering General Hospital provides maternity services to the population of Kettering and the surrounding areas.
Maternity services include an early pregnancy unit, outpatient department, maternity assessment unit known as the Fetal Health Unit, antenatal and postnatal ward (Rowan), Delivery Suite incorporating an assessment bay, triage bay and an enhanced care area, 2 maternity theatres, and an ultrasound department. The service had previously had a midwifery led birthing centre, although this was closed at the time of our inspection and had been for some time. Between April 2021 to March 2022 there were 3,275 deliveries at Kettering 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.
We last inspected the maternity service in February 2019 and rated it as good. At this inspection we rated safe and well led only. We rated both safe and well-led as Requires Improvement.
Our rating of this hospital is Requires Improvement because our rating of Requires Improvement for maternity services did not change the ratings for the hospital overall.
How we carried out the inspection
We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.
We visited maternity assessment (Fetal Health) Unit, delivery suite including triage, and the maternity theatres, and the antenatal and postnatal wards. The midwifery led birthing centre rooms were closed during the inspection.
We spoke with 18 midwives, 4 support workers, 9 women and birthing people and 3 birthing partners and or relatives. We received 6 responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.
We reviewed 9 patient care records, 5 observation and escalation charts and 7 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.