- NHS hospital
St James's University Hospital
Report from 18 October 2024 assessment
Contents
Ratings - Maternity
Our view of the service
St James University Hospital provided obstetric and midwifery services along with community midwifery care and worked closely with Leeds General Infirmary, the tertiary unit where birthing people and babies with complex needs received their care. The service included pre-conceptual care, early pregnancy care, antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal care. The maternity unit included an obstetric consultant-led delivery suite, maternity assessment centre (triage), and wards for antenatal and postnatal care. The birth centre had 8 delivery rooms, 1 birthing room and 2 water birth rooms. All birthing rooms had en suite facilities. The postnatal wards consisted of bays of 4 to 6 beds and there were single side rooms for those who had additional clinical care needs.
In the year April 2022 to March 2023 there were a total of 4,293 births at St James University Hospital.
We visited the antenatal clinic, antenatal day unit, maternity assessment centre (MAC), antenatal ward and postnatal ward, delivery suite and obstetric theatres. We spoke with women who used the service and staff, including midwives, doctors, consultants and senior managers. In addition to this, we also held focus groups with midwives, doctors and consultants to hear their views of the service they provided. We observed care and treatment, inspected several patients' care records in each area we visited, and reviewed the Trust's audits and performance.
We found breaches of regulations relating to; learning following incidents, risk management, safe environment, infection prevention and control, medicines management and some governance processes. Following our inspection, we issued the service with a warning notice in regard to staffing.
We refer to women in this report, but we recognise that some transgender men, non-binary people and people with variations in sex characteristics (VSC) or who are intersex may also use services and experience some of the same issues'
We inspected the maternity service at St James's University Hospital following a number of concerns surrounding the safety and quality of care people who used the service received.
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We carried out a comprehensive unannounced inspection of the maternity service, looking at the safe, effective, caring, responsive and well led key questions.
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St James's University Hospital is rated Requires Improvement. We also inspected 1 other maternity service run by Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. Our reports are here: Leeds General Infirmary - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RR801
People's experience of this service
We spoke with 15 parents and family members who attended maternity services during our inspection. Those we spoke with during the inspection gave us mixed feedback about their experiences of the service. We also received mixed feedback about the service directly to CQC via calls and emails. Some people told us they experienced care that was not always kind or compassionate. Others told us the attitude of some staff made them delay contacting services when they had concerns. However, other people told us the treatment they received was kind and caring.
We heard from midwifery staff that there were challenges in providing the level of care they wished to because of significant staffing shortfalls against the requirements of the service.