9 November 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 Crowborough Birthing Centre.
We inspected the maternity service at Crowborough Birthing Centre 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 Crowborough Birthing Service provides maternity services to the population of Crowborough.
Between November 2022 October 2023, 154 babies were born at Crowborough Birthing Centre.
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.
Crowborough Birthing Centre was not previously inspected under Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust.
Our rating of this hospital is rated as Requires Improvement. We rated safe as requires improvement and well-led as requires improvement.
There are two other maternity services run by Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust.
Our reports are here:
Maidstone Birthing Centre – https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RWF03
The Tunbridge Wells Hospital at Pembury - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RWFTW
How we carried out the inspection
We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.
We visited the midwifery led birthing centre.
We spoke with 3 midwives, 2 maternity support workers, 1 domestic worker, 1 volunteer and 1 service user. There was 1 woman admitted into the birthing centre during the inspection.
We reviewed 5 patient care 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.