Maternity Service in Surrey gets inadequate rating
The service at St Peter's Hospital in Chertsey received the rating after an inspection in January.
The Maternity Service at St Peter's Hospital has been rated inadequate by the Care Quality Commission, following an inspection in January.
The Ashford and St Peter's NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the hospital, has been served with a warning notice.
The Care Quality Commission's rating of the Foundation Trust remains good, whilst the rating of the hospital remains that it requires improvement.
"There are staffing concerns within this service."
The inspection found that there were gaps in the service's infection prevention control measures, and that there were significant staffing shortages that reflected national shortfalls.
They also found that some medical staff had not completed mandatory training.
The inspection was carried out by the Care Quality Commission's national maternity services inspection programme.
However, the inspection also identified some positives from the service, including that staff managed medicines well, staff worked hard despite workforce challenge, and that there was a positive transparent culture.
"Providing safe, high quality care for our patients is our priority."
Carolyn Jenkinson, the Deputy Director of Specialist Healthcare at the Care Quality Commission, said that "There are staffing concerns within this service. Like maternity services nationally, there are shortages of midwifes and obstetricians, and that was having an impact on the care that they could provide at Ashford and St Peter's."
She also said that "we found that there were some issues with risk assessments for women, especially in the triage area, where women attend if they've got a concern about their pregnancy and they need to be seen by a midwife or a doctor."
"The hospital will continue and has continued to deliver services to women. We will monitor how improvements are being made at the Trust, we already know that they have been working on a lot of the things that we've raised at the time of the inspections and they'll continue to do that.
"At some point in time later this year we will go back again to check that those improvements have been made, but more importantly, that they've been sustained."
A spokesperson for the Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said that: "Providing safe, high quality care for our patients is our priority and we apologise to any women, babies and families for whom the care we provided fell short."
"While there are some areas of good practice recognised by the CQC, we take the concerns raised in this report extremely seriously and following the inspection in January we have been taking urgent action to make significant improvements to the quality and safety of care provided. This includes increasing clinical staff in our maternity triage unit to care for women safely and increasing the size of the unit to improve the experience and dignity of those in our care.
They went on to say that: "Action is also being taken to improve staff training compliance and Infection Prevention and Control across the service. We are committed to giving both those using our maternity service and the CQC confidence in the quality and safety of our care.”