1 August 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 4 the ratings and information relate to maternity services based at University Hospital Lewisham.
We inspected the maternity service at University Hospital Lewisham 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.
University Hospital Lewisham is based in Lewisham, Southeast London and is part of the Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust and the Southeast Local Maternity and Neonatal System (LMNS). The hospital provides maternity services to women living across the boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich, and Bexley.
The maternity service at University Hospital Lewisham included a range of antenatal, intrapartum, and postnatal care and comprises of a maternity day assessment unit, antenatal clinic, maternity wards, triage unit, delivery suite, maternity led unit, home birth service and a community midwifery service. Additional antenatal and postnatal services are provided at the sister site, Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich. From July 2022 to June 2023, there were 3,124 deliveries at the hospital.
We last carried out a comprehensive inspection of the maternity service in September 2018.
We will publish a report of our overall findings when we have completed the national inspection programme.
We carried out an announced focused inspection of the maternity service, looking only at the safe and well-led key questions.
We did not review the rating of the location, therefore our rating of this hospital stayed the same. University Hospital Lewisham overall rating is requires improvement.
We also inspected the other maternity services run by Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust. Our reports are here:
Queen Elizabeth Hospital – https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RJ231
How we carried out the inspection
We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.
We visited the maternity theatres, maternity assessment (Triage), labour ward, birth centre, day assessment unit, the antenatal and postnatal wards and antenatal clinics.
We spoke with 40 multidisciplinary staff, 2 women and birthing people and 2 birthing partners and or relatives.
We reviewed 8 patient care records, 8 Observation and escalation charts and 8 medicines records.
Following our onsite inspection, we spoke with 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 .