Updated 8 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 Horton General Hospital.
We inspected the maternity service at Horton 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 Horton General Hospital provides maternity services to the population of Banbury and North Oxfordshire.
Maternity services include an outpatient department, maternity assessment centre and midwifery led birthing unit. Between January 2023 and October 2023, 141 babies were born at Horton Midwifery Led Unit.
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.
This location was last inspected under the maternity and gynaecology framework in 2014. Following a consultation process CQC split the assessment of maternity and gynaecology in 2018. As such the historical maternity and gynaecology rating is not comparable to the current maternity inspection and is therefore retired. This means that the resulting rating for Safe and Well-led from this inspection will be the first rating of maternity services for the location. This does not affect the overall Trust level rating.
We rated it as Requires Improvement:
- Our rating of Requires Improvement for maternity services changed ratings for the hospital overall. We rated safe and well-led as Requires Improvement.
Horton General Hospital – https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RTH05
How we carried out the inspection
We provided the service with 2 working days notice of our inspection.
We visited the midwife led birthing unit and the outpatient’s departments. Women and birthing people attending the maternity assessment centre are seen in the midwife led birthing unit.
We spoke with 3 midwives and 3 support workers. We received 108 responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.
We reviewed 5 patient care records, 1 'observation and escalation’ chart and 5 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.