The Care Quality Commission
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  • NHS hospital

North Devon District Hospital

Overall: Requires improvement read more about inspection ratings

Raleigh Park, Barnstaple, Devon, EX31 4JB (01271) 322577

Provided and run by:
Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

Important: This service was previously managed by a different provider - see old profile

All Inspections

30 November 2023

During an inspection looking at part of the service

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 North Devon District Hospital.

We inspected the maternity service at North Devon District 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.

North Devon District Hospital provides maternity services to a population of 165,000.

Maternity services include an outpatient department, antenatal and postnatal ward (Bassett), labour ward, and one maternity theatre. Between April 2022 and March 2023, 1,240 babies were born at North Devon District 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 stayed the same. We rated it as Requires Improvement.

  • Our rating of Requires Improvement for maternity services did not change ratings for the hospital overall. We rated safe as Requires Improvement and well led as Requires Improvement.

We also inspected one other maternity service run by Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. Our report is here:

Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital (Wonford) – https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RH801

How we carried out the inspection

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

We visited the Labour ward / Delivery Suite, and the antenatal and postnatal ward.

We spoke with 9 midwives, 2 support workers and 1 woman who was using the service.

We reviewed 12 patient care records, 5 observation and escalation charts and 7 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.

30 November 2022

During a routine inspection

Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust and Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust is part of the Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust which was established in April 2022. Stretching across Northern, Eastern and Mid Devon, the trust has a workforce of over 15,000 staff, making it the largest employer in Devon. The trust provides services for more than 615,000 people, covers more than 2,000 square miles across Devon. Some of the trusts specialist services cover the whole of the peninsula, extending as far as Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

North Devon District Hospital is the trust’s district general hospital in Barnstaple, offering emergency and urgent care for people in North Devon and the surrounding areas. This includes an emergency department, intensive care unit, women and children’s services, diagnostics, outpatient clinics and specialist services.

The medical care service includes 9 wards delivering, specialist and general medical services. The combined medical admissions for the trust was 71,958 from March 2021 to Feb 2022.

The surgical service includes 4 surgical wards and 9 operating theatres. The general surgical team encompasses a full range of emergency and elective inpatient and day case surgery.

The diagnostic imaging department currently includes general X-rays, Fluoroscopy and Interventional procedures, Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Ultrasound, Mammography and Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DXA scans). For the purposes of this report, the different types of examinations taken will be referred to as modalities. In the12 months up until 12 December 2022, the service had performed a total of 102,142 examinations across all modalities. This included 17,485 CT scans, 7434 MRI scans and 54,818 plain film x-rays