The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has confirmed that it has taken action to protect people using County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust’s maternity services following an inspection earlier this year.
The CQC’s findings
Inspectors concluded that the University Hospital of North Durham’s rating for their maternity services being safe and well-led had gone down from ‘good’ to ‘inadequate’, meaning that the overall rating for maternity services at the hospital was also ‘inadequate’.
In addition, the rating at Darlington Memorial Hospital maternity services was also confirmed as ‘inadequate’ for being safe and well-led, again bringing their overall rating down to ‘inadequate’.
The CQC has published its findings, and some of the findings were:
- Not all staff had training in key skills needed for their roles.
- Senior leaders didn’t always support staff to develop their skills.
- Staff had limited awareness and understanding of the service’s vision and values and weren’t always able to apply them in their work.
- Leaders didn’t operate effective systems and didn’t always manage risk and performance well.
- The service didn’t always engage well with women using the service, and the local community to plan and manage services.
- Staff didn’t consistently carry out checks on equipment.
- Staff didn’t always feel respected, supported, and valued.
Deputy Director of Secondary and Specialist Healthcare at CQC, Carolyn Jenkinson, said:
“When we inspected maternity services at County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, it was concerning to see such a deterioration in the level of care being provided to women, people using the service and their babies.
Across both maternity services, leaders urgently need to mitigate the negative impact of understaffing. We saw that staff had reported delayed inductions of labour, including babies categorised as high risk, due to understaffing. Midwives had told managers they found the unit was unsafe, but no improvement had been made and staff continued to work late, miss breaks, and take sick leave due to stress which is totally unacceptable.
We were concerned that women and people using the service weren’t being observed or risk assessed appropriately which increased the risk of a delay in recognising when their condition deteriorated and that their care could be delayed….
We found multiple examples where screening tests hadn’t been carried out to safely manage the pregnancies of women and people using the service. There had been over 70 incidents over the past year where national screening standards or internal policies hadn’t been followed which could place women, people using the service and babies at risk.”
You can read the full reports on the CQC website here.
What happens next?
Following their inspection, the CQC issued a warning notice to focus the Trust’s attention on rapidly making the necessary improvements to how they were managing each maternity service.
Trust leaders have already provided information on action which has been taken to improve risk assessments and observations to lessen the delays in recognising when a patient’s condition deteriorates.
CQC’s maternity inspection programme
The CQC inspection at County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust was carried out as part of their maternity inspection programme.
This aims to provide an up-to-date view of the quality of hospital maternity services across the country, and a better understanding of what is working well to support learning and improvement at a local and national level.
The programme was introduced in 2022 following significant challenges faced by maternity services across the board over the last few years. It involves the inspection of all NHS acute hospital maternity services which had not been inspected since April 2021.
Comment
Very sadly, these reports of maternity services failing their patients are becoming quite common. This is the latest in a long line of maternity services where CQC inspections have found multiple problems which are significant enough to be putting patients at risk.
These inspections and reports are clearly vital in the mammoth task of improving maternity services. The CQC are doing incredible work at reviewing services and highlighting where the issues are.
Understanding the issues in depth is the starting point for Trusts to be able to make improvements, of course. However, it is unacceptable that people using maternity services and their babies have been put at such significant risk, and it is now vital that action is taken urgently to protect those using the services.
Maternity clinical negligence claims
The sad reality is that the failings in maternity services at present are putting people at risk of injury and even death.
If this were to happen as a result of substandard care, you may well be entitled to claim compensation for clinical negligence.
If this has happened to you, it is imperative that you seek specialist legal advice.
At Nelsons, our experienced team of medical negligence solicitors investigate and successfully pursue birth injury claims for children and mothers injured during childbirth.
Our expert team is recognised by The Law Society, the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL), Headway, The Foundation for Infant Loss Training, Chambers and Partners and The Legal 500 for our work involving injured babies and children. We are one of a few specialist firms that are still able to offer Legal Aid in cases involving babies.
How can we help?
Danielle Young is a Legal Director in our Medical Negligence team, which has been ranked in tier one by the independently researched publication, The Legal 500.
If you have any questions in relation to the subjects discussed in this article, then please get in touch with Danielle or another member of the team in Derby, Leicester, or Nottingham on 0800 024 1976 or via our online form.
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