Bridgwater Community Hospital

Pages 1 and 2 of this report relate to the hospital and the ratings of that location, from page 3 the ratings and information relate to maternity services based at Bridgwater Community Hospital.

We inspected the Mary Stanley midwife-led unit at Bridgwater Community 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 Mary Stanley midwife-led unit at Bridgwater Community Hospital provides maternity services to the population of Bridgewater, Minehead, Glastonbury and the surrounding areas.

Maternity services include a midwifery-led birthing centre with 2 birthing rooms both with birthing pool rooms. At the time of inspection, one birthing room was used as a clinic room and the other was set up for births. Between October 2022 and October 2023, 5 babies were born at the Mary Stanley midwife-led unit at Bridgwater Community 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.

We had not previously rated this hospital. We did not have sufficient evidence to rate the hospital overall. We rated maternity services requires improvement in safe and well-led.

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

• Musgrove Park Hospital - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RH5A8
• Yeovil District Hospital - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RH5O4

How we carried out the inspection

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

We visited the two birthing rooms at Mary Stanley midwife-led unit.

We spoke with 2 midwives.

We reviewed 2 patient care records and 2 observation and escalation charts.

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.