Updated 30 June 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 Birmingham Women’s Hospital.
We inspected the maternity service at Birmingham Women’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.
We carried out an announced focused inspection of the maternity service, looking only at the safe and well-led key questions.
Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust provides maternity services for the population of Birmingham and the surrounding areas. The fetal medicine centre receives regional and national referrals. The maternity department comprises of delivery suite, triage, postnatal and antenatal wards, day assessment unit, midwife and consultant led clinics, scanning services, a bereavement suite, as well as a maternity led unit birthing centre.
We did not review the rating of the location therefore our rating of this hospital stayed the same
This hospital is rated Good.
How we carried out the inspection
We spoke with 32 staff including senior leaders, matrons, shift leads, midwives, obstetric staff, specialist midwives, receptionists, cleaning contractors, clinical governance leads and safety champions to better understand what it was like working for the service. We interviewed leaders to gain insight into the trust’s leadership model and the governance of the service. We reviewed 8 sets of maternity and 17 medicine records. We also looked at a wide range of documents including standard operating procedures, meeting minutes, risk assessments, recent reported incidents as well as audits and audit actions.
We ran a poster campaign during out inspection to encourage pregnant women and mothers who had used the service to give us feedback regarding care. We received 2 feedback forms from women. We analysed the results to identify themes and trends.
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.