16 May 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 Royal Albert Edward Infirmary.
We inspected the maternity service at The Royal Albert Edward Infirmary 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.
We will publish a report of our overall findings when we have completed the national inspection programme.
We carried out a short announced focused inspection of the maternity service, looking only at the safe and well-led key questions.
Royal Albert Edward Infirmary is a district general hospital located near Wigan town centre. It provides a full range of maternity services including both antenatal and postnatal ward with 28 beds including three single rooms. There are approximately 2000 deliveries each year, with caesarean sections and instrumental delivery rates in line with national average.
The trust has two offsite antenatal clinics; The Thomas Linacre Centre in Wigan and Leigh Infirmary; both clinics provide consultant and midwifery clinics. We did not inspect these clinics as part of this inspection.
Our ratings of the maternity service stayed the same and the ratings for the hospital remained the same. We rated safe as requires improvement and well-led as good and the hospital as good.
How we carried out the inspection
During our inspection of maternity services at Wrightington Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust we spoke with 27 staff including leaders, obstetricians, midwives, and maternity support workers.
We visited all areas of the unit including the antenatal clinic, maternity triage, labour ward, birth centre, day assessment, antenatal and postnatal ward. We reviewed the environment, maternity policies and 12 maternity records. We also looked at a wide range of documents including standard operating procedures, meeting minutes, risk assessments, recent reported incidents as well as audits and audit actions. Following the inspection, we reviewed data we had requested from the service to inform our judgements.
We ran a poster campaign during our inspection to encourage pregnant women, birthing people who had used the service to give us feedback regarding care. We analysed the results of the eight responses we had back to identify themes and trends. These reflected a mixed response describing a kind and caring workforce but with some people experiencing delays to treatment and support during their stay in the maternity unit.
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