28 September 2023
During an inspection looking at part of the service
Pages 1 and 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 Royal Surrey County Hospital.
We inspected the maternity service at Royal Surrey County 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 Royal Surrey County Hospital provides maternity services to the population of Guildford, Cranleigh, Farnham and surrounding areas.
We will publish a report of our overall findings when we have completed the national inspection programme.
Maternity services include an early pregnancy unit, maternal and fetal medicine, outpatient department, planned assessment unit, maternity triage, antenatal ward (St Catherines Ward), delivery suite (Consultant-led Birthing Suite), midwifery led birthing suite, two maternity theatres, postnatal ward (Shere Ward), enhanced care, ultrasound department and 6 maternity community hubs. Between October 2022 and September 2023, 2,977 babies were born at Royal Surrey County 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.
During our quality assurance process we noted the location should have been rated as Outstanding since our previous inspection which was published in June 2020. Therefore our rating of this hospital stayed the same. We rated it as Outstanding.
We rated maternity services as Outstanding because we rated safe as Good and well-led as Outstanding.
How we carried out the inspection
We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.
We visited Maternity planned assessment unit, maternity triage, maternity theatre, recovery, enhanced care, delivery suite, birth centre, antenatal clinic, the antenatal and postnatal wards.
We spoke with 36 multidisciplinary staff, 4 women and birthing people and 1 birthing partner and or relatives. We received 5 responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.
We reviewed 7 patient care records, 7 Observation and escalation charts and 7 medicines records.
Following our onsite inspection, we spoke with 6 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.