Updated 9 February 2024
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 Gosport War Hospital
We inspected the Blake Birth Centre maternity service at Gosport War Memorial 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.
We will publish a report of our overall findings when we have completed the national inspection programme.
Blake Birth Centre is located on the first floor of Gosport War Memorial Hospital and provides maternity services to the population of Gosport, Fareham and surrounding areas.
Maternity services at Gosport War Memorial Hospital include antenatal, intrapartum (care during labour and delivery) and postnatal maternity care. The service has four clinic rooms and one delivery room with ensuite facilities and a birthing pool.
Blake Birth Centre is open 8am to 8pm Monday to Friday and 8am to 5pm at the weekend for antenatal and postnatal clinics. Out of these hours, care is provided to women and birthing people on an on-call basis.
Intrapartum care activity levels at Blake Birth Centre were low. Between October 2022 and October 2023, 7 babies were born at Gosport War Memorial Hospital. Due to the refurbishment of the birthing room at Gosport War Memorial Hospital the unit was closed in October and November 2022. There were no births at the birth centre in February, March, June, August, September and October 2023.
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 inspected maternity services at Gosport War Memorial Hospital.
We also inspected 2 other maternity services run by Portsmouth University Hospitals NHS Trust.
Our reports are here:
- Queen Alexandra Hospital - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RHU03
- St Mary's Hospital - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RHU02
How we carried out the inspection
We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.
We visited the birthing room and clinic rooms.
We spoke with 4 midwives, including the birth centre lead midwife.
We reviewed 3 patient care 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.