Musgrove Park Hospital

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 Musgrove Park Hospital.

We inspected the maternity service at Musgrove Park 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.

Musgrove Park Hospital provides maternity services to the population of Taunton and Somerset.

Maternity services included a Triage Ward with 4 beds and a side room; Antenatal Ward (Willow Ward) which included 4 induction of labour beds, 6 antenatal beds and 1 side room with en-suite facility; a midwifery led alongside birthing centre (Bracken Birth Centre) which included 2 pool rooms with en-suite facilities and 6 postnatal beds; a Postnatal Ward (Fern Ward) which had 11 beds across 2 bays, 2 transitional care beds in a shared bay and accommodation for up to 5 parents whose babies were on special care. There was a labour ward with 7 birthing rooms, 1 of which had a birthing pool and a procedure room; 2 recovery beds and 1 theatre. In the last year approximately 3000 babies were born at Musgrove Park 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.

Our rating of this hospital went down. We rated it as requires improvement because:

• Our rating of Inadequate for maternity services changed the ratings for the hospital overall. We rated maternity services as inadequate in both safe and well-led.

We also inspected 2 other maternity services run by Somerset NHS Foundation Trust. Our reports are here:

• Yeovil District Hospital - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RH5O4

• Bridgwater Community Hospital - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RH5K6
  How we carried out the inspection

We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.

We visited triage, labour ward, the antenatal and postnatal wards, transitional care, and the Bracken Birth Centre.

We spoke with 8 doctors, 10 midwives, 2 support workers, 7 women and birthing people and their birthing partners and/or relatives. We received 12 responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.

We reviewed 7 patient care records and 9 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, recent 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.