Gloucestershire maternity services rated inadequate

Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been told to make improvements.

Gloucestershire Royal Hospital
Author: Jessica McGillivrayPublished 15th Jan 2025

Maternity services at the Royal Gloucestershire Hospital has been rated inadequate by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

It comes after they conducted unannounced inspection in March and April 2022.

In May the CQC imposed urgent conditions on the trust to make improvements to ensure the safety of women and people using the services.

The conditions are still in place with the trust having to report to the CQC on a fortnightly basis to provide them with updates on their progress.

Multiple areas were highlighted as problematic including the ability to manage systems that identifies risks to mothers, babies and people using the services.

There were also problems where leaders were not effectively identifying or addressing areas for improvement and learning from these didn’t result in changes that would improve care.

For example, cases of women bleeding heavily after giving birth which is life-threatening were continuing to rise compared to previous months, but no effective action had been taken to address it.

CQC’s head of hospital inspections, Catherine Campbell said: “Our inspection of maternity services at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital revealed that while we saw some positive changes, not enough work had been done yet to address the basic issues around safety.”

We have contacted the Gloucestershire NHS Trust Foundation for comment.

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