The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has rated the maternity services at St George’s Hospital as inadequate following an inspection in March of this year.
Maternity services at the hospital have been rated as inadequate overall, but also inadequate for being safe and well-led.
Following the inspection, the CQC issued a warning notice to focus the Trust’s attention on making the necessary improvements to keep people safe at St George’s Hospital.
CQC’s deputy director of secondary and specialist healthcare, Carolyn Jenkinson, said:
“When we inspected maternity services at St George’s Hospital, it was concerning to see a deterioration in the standard of care being delivered. We saw areas where significant and urgent improvements are needed to ensure safe care is provided to women, people using this service, and their babies.
“Both staff and people using the service were being let down by leaders who failed to respond quickly, resulting in care that was unsafe, and in the delivery suite, also chaotic.
“When things went wrong, we saw staff were honest and supportive to people, but leaders were slow to respond and often logged incidents as causing less harm than they did. We saw some baby deaths weren’t investigated as serious incidents and investigations didn’t always take place in a timely way. This is unacceptable and put people at risk of avoidable harm from mistakes being repeated.
“Staff told us care often felt unsafe because there weren’t enough of them, and we saw they’d reported numerous incidents in which people’s safety was at risk. Staff said managers told them nothing could be done, but we found opportunities to reduce risks had been missed or ignored.
“We also found people were at risk of infection because ward environments were dirty and poorly maintained. Again, staff had raised many issues with the trust, but some longstanding problems still hadn’t been fixed. Leaders must listen and act when staff tell them something isn’t right.
“Following the inspection, we’ve issued a warning notice to focus the trust’s attention on how they’re managing risks to women and people using this service, as well as their babies, and we expect to see rapid and significant improvements. The trust has submitted an action plan on how they plan to resolve the issues raised.
“We’ll continue to monitor the service and the wider trust, including through future inspections, and won’t hesitate to take further action if we’re not assured it’s delivering safe and effective care.”
The CQC’s inspectors found:
- Medical staff didn’t always have enough training in resuscitation, caring for people with disabilities or safeguarding children and young people.
- Leaders didn’t always act quickly to reduce risks to people’s safety from understaffing, didn’t always try to understand why many staff were leaving, and hadn’t mentioned issues in maternity during the Trust’s annual staffing review.
- The delivery suite had no clear leadership to make sure women and people using the service received safe, consistent care.
- The service didn’t assess people’s risk in a consistent way when they arrived and didn’t always prioritise people according to their clinical need.
You can read the full report here.
Comment
St George’s Hospital maternity service is sadly the latest in a long list of Trusts where issues have been found. Multiple reviews and inquiries over the last couple of years have raised significant safety concerns at various hospitals and it will be devastating to those who have used and who may be expecting to use the service in the future to learn of the significant issues found at St George’s.
It is clear that women and babies are being put at risk as a result of inadequacies in the maternity services at the hospital and urgent improvements must be an absolute priority.
How can Nelsons 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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