07 December 2023
During an inspection looking at part of the service
Pages 1 to 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 Ormskirk District General Hospital.
We inspected the maternity service at Ormskirk District General 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 hospital provides maternity services to the population of Mersey and West Lancashire.
Maternity services include antenatal clinics, an antenatal and a postnatal ward, triage and a consultant led delivery suite. Between April 2022 and March 2023, 2212, babies were born at Ormskirk district 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.
This was the first time we inspected Ormskirk District Hospital maternity services since the acquisition to form Mersey and West Lancashire Teaching Hospitals Trust.
We also inspected 1 other maternity service run by Mersey and West Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. Our reports are here:
Whiston Hospital - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RBN01
How we carried out the inspection
We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.
We visited pregnancy assessment unit (PAU), triage, delivery suite, and the maternity ward.
We spoke with senior leaders, 3 obstetric medical staff, 9 midwives, 1 support worker, 2 women and birthing people and 2 birthing partners and/or relatives. We received 80 responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.
We reviewed 6 patient care records, 6 observation and escalation charts and 5 medicines records.
Following our onsite inspection, we spoke with senior leaders within the service, we looked at a wide range of documents including standard operating procedures, guidelines, meeting minutes, risk assessments, recent reported incidents, 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.