Three Manchester Hospital Maternity Units at Saint Mary’s Hospital,Wythenshawe Hospital and North Manchester General Hospital have receieved a damning report by Inspectors from the Care Quality Comission
Inspections back in March found that both Wythenshawe and North Manchester General Hospitals were “not always assured staff were competent” while at St Mary’s the team were told to urgently improve their services
Inspectors at North Manchester found that staff did not always have access to enough suitable equipment to provide safe care for women and babies and opportunities to prevent or minimise harm were missed and could not always access care records and did not consistently manage medicines well
At Wythenshawe,Risks and action plans were not always followed up and the service did not always control infection risk well and some areas posed an infection risk while at
Carolyn Jenkinson, deputy director of secondary and specialist healthcare at the CQC said: “When we inspected maternity services at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, it was disappointing to see a deterioration in the level of care being provided to women, people using the service and their babies.
“Due to our concerns, we issued the trust with a warning notice requiring them to make rapid improvements.
“We found leaders had the skills and abilities to run maternity services and understood the issues they faced. However, they didn’t consistently address them in a timely way to ensure people were receiving safe care.
“Since the inspection the trust have developed an action plan and started to make improvements. We will continue to monitor it closely.”
Commenting on the findings Manchester University NHS Foundation said that although the CQC report highlighted several areas of good practice across our maternity services, we were naturally disappointed with the overall rating.
We have confidence in our ability to improve maternity services for women and their families and have embarked on a focused programme of improvements.
The inspection took place in March. Since then, improvements have included reducing waiting times in triage.investing in staff to increase the number of operating lists available.providing additional staff in key areas of the service.increasing numbers of senior doctors available during peak times and launching a wide-reaching recruitment campaign.
