24 October 2023
During an inspection looking at part of the service
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 The Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
We inspected the maternity service at The Queen Elizabeth 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 Queen Elizabeth Hospital provides maternity services to the population of west Norfolk, north Cambridgeshire and south Lincolnshire.
Maternity services include a maternal and fetal medicine, outpatient department, maternity assessment unit, combined antenatal and postnatal ward (Brancaster), central delivery suite / labour ward, midwifery led birthing centre (Waterlily), and two maternity theatres. Between April 2022 and January 2023, there were 1598 babies born at The Queen Elizabeth 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.
Our rating of this hospital stayed the same. We rated it as Requires Improvement because:
Our rating of Good for maternity services did not change ratings for the hospital overall. We rated safe as Requires Improvement and well-led as Good.
How we carried out the inspection
We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.
We visited maternity assessment unit, maternity triage, delivery suite, the antenatal and postnatal ward and the antenatal clinic. We spoke with 22 people including the interim head of midwifery, an obstetrician, 3 doctors, an anaesthetic consultant, 13 midwives and two women and their families. We attended handover meetings and reviewed records.
We received 90 responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.
Feedback received indicated 55% of women and birthing people had mostly positive views about their experience, although 45% had mixed or negative views. Feedback included concerns about communication, staffing numbers and support needed following birth.
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.