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 Edgware Community Hospital.
We inspected the maternity service at Edgware Birth 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 Edgware Birth Centre provides maternity services to the population Edgware. Out of area women and birthing people using the service included people coming from Northwick Park, Barnet, Harrow, Stanmore, and Watford.
Maternity services include a standalone birth centre. The birth centre is open ‘on demand’ for local women and birthing people presenting as low risk. Other services provided at the birth centre include antenatal appointments, antenatal education classes, and postnatal clinics. Between September 2022 and October 2023 ,19 babies were born at Edgware Birth 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.
We have not rated this location before. This service was registered with CQC 1 April 2010.
We also inspected two other maternity services run by Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. Our reports are here:
Barnet General Hospital - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RAL26
The Royal Free London - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RAL01
How we carried out the inspection
We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection. We visited Edgware Birth Centre on 24 October 2023. We spoke with 10 midwives. We did not receive responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.
We reviewed 5 patient care records, 5 observation and escalation charts and 5 medicines records.
Following our onsite inspection, we spoke with senior leaders within the service and carried out two focused groups with midwives and more senior staff including medical staff, to explore pain management during labour. 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.