The Care Quality Commission
  • Hospital
  • NHS hospital

Blackburn Birthing Centre

Overall: Good read more about inspection ratings

Park Lee Road, Blackburn, Lancashire, BB2 3NX (01254) 263555

Provided and run by:
East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust

All Inspections

2 November 2022

During an inspection looking at part of the service

We inspected the maternity service at Blackburn Birth Centre 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.

We carried out a short notice announced focused inspection of the maternity service, looking only at the safe and well-led key questions.

The inspection was carried out using a post-inspection data submission and an on-site inspection where we observed the environment, observed care, conducted interviews with patients and staff, reviewed policies, care records medicines charts and documentation. Following the site visit, we conducted interviews with senior leaders and reviewed feedback from women and families about the trust.

We ran a poster campaign during our inspection to encourage pregnant women and mothers who had used the service to give us feedback regarding care. We received 23 feedback forms from women. We analysed the results to identify themes and trends.

Blackburn Birth Centre is a stand-alone midwife led birth centre. It has 4 birthing rooms, 2 of which have pools and a 4-bedded rest area. Ante and postnatal clinics are also provided at this location and it is the base for community midwives. It provides maternity services to women in the Blackburn, Burnley, Pendle, Rossendale, Hyndburn and Ribble Valley areas.

The local maternity population come from higher levels than deprivation than the national average with 34% in the most deprived decile compared to 12% nationally. More mothers were Asian or Asian British (24% compared to the national average of 14%) and fewer were White than the national average. Since February 2022, the trust has been in the upper 25% of all organisations for women who were current smokers at booking appointment.

Maternity services across the trust delivered 5,857 babies between January and December 2021. Blackburn Birth Centre delivered 94 babies between April 2021 and March 2022.

We did not rate this unit at this inspection. The previous rating of good remains.

We also inspected 2 other maternity services run by East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust. Our reports are here:

Burnley General Hospital – https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RXR10

Rossendale Primary Care Centre - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RXRE9

How we carried out the inspection

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 April 2014

During a routine inspection

Blackburn Birthing Centre is one of seven hospitals and care centres that form East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust. This location provides maternity services only. It is a free-standing birth centre where women for whom problems are not anticipated can give birth to their babies in a relaxed ‘home-from-home’ atmosphere. Although registered with CQC with the name Blackburn Birthing Centre it is known locally as Blackburn Birth Centre, so will be referred to in this way in the rest of the report.

The unit comprises four delivery rooms and a four-bed post-natal bay to allow mothers and babies to remain for a period after delivery. There are approximately 950 babies born here each year.

We carried out a comprehensive inspection because East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust had been flagged as high risk on the Care Quality Commission (CQC) ‘intelligent monitoring’ system (which looks at a wide range of data, including patient and staff surveys, hospital performance information, and the views of the public and local partner organisations). The inspection took place on 30 April 2014.

Overall, this birth centre was providing a good service. We rated it as ‘good’ for providing effective care, caring for patients, being responsive to patients’ needs and being well-led. However, we found that improvements were required in providing safe care.

Our key findings were as follows:

  • Care was delivered with kindness and compassion. Women were treated with dignity and respect.
  • Incidents were reported and there was evidence of learning as a result of these.
  • Ward, birthing and communal areas were clean and infection control practices were in place.
  • Birthing mats were worn with ragged edges in places and were stained.
  • Midwifery staffing levels within the birth centre were sufficient to provide a safe service.
  • Women were provided with food and drink, although the provision was limited.
  • Transfers of women from the birth centre to hospital were low.

We saw several areas of outstanding practice, including:

  • East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust’s maternity services, of which the Blackburn Birth Centre forms part, were awarded the Royal College of Midwives’ Mothercare Maternity Service of the Year Award (along with Downpatrick Community Maternity Services, Northern Ireland and NHS Forth Valley, Scotland) for their ‘innovative work to improve maternity services, promote normal births and facilitate staff engagement activities’. They received the award for improving normal birth rates, reducing caesarean section rates and increasing birth choice for women.

However, there were also areas of poor practice where the trust needs to make improvements:

Importantly, the trust must:

  • Birthing mats must be cleaned and regularly checked for any damage, replacing them as necessary.

In addition the trust should:

  • Personal development reviews should be recorded correctly so an accurate figure for those completed is available.
  • There should be support available and used for women and partners whose first language is not English.  

Professor Sir Mike Richards

​Chief Inspector of Hospitals