21 and 22 August 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 The James Cook University Hospital.
We inspected the maternity service at The James Cook University 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 James Cook University Hospital provides maternity services to the population of Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland and Northallerton.
Maternity services include an early pregnancy unit, maternal and fetal medicine, outpatient department, maternity assessment unit, antenatal ward (ward 19), central delivery suite, midwifery led birthing centre (ward 16, Marton suite), 2 maternity theatres, and a postnatal ward (ward 17). Between April 2021 and March 2022 4630 babies were born at The James Cook University 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 location was last inspected under the maternity and gynaecology framework in 2015. Following a consultation process CQC split the assessment of maternity and gynaecology in 2018. As such the historical maternity and gynaecology rating is not comparable to the current maternity inspection and is therefore retired. This means that the resulting rating for Safe and Well-led from this inspection will be the first rating of maternity services for the location. This does not affect the overall Trust level rating.
Our rating of this hospital stayed the same. We rated it as good because:
- Our rating of Requires Improvement for maternity services did not change ratings for the hospital overall. We rated maternity services requires improvement for safe and well-led.
We also inspected 1 other maternity service run by South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Our reports are here:
The Friarage Hospital – https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RTR45
How we carried out the inspection
We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.
We visited maternity assessment (triage), delivery suite, the midwifery led unit, the antenatal and postnatal wards, obstetric theatres, and the day assessment unit.
We spoke with approximately 30 members of the maternity staff at all levels of the service.
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 also looked at a wide range of documents including standard operating procedures, guidelines, meeting minutes, risk assessments, recently 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.