28 June 2023
During an inspection looking at part of the service
We inspected the maternity service at Dorset County 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.
Dorset County Hospital provides maternity services to the population of west and north Dorset, including Dorchester, Weymouth and Portland, and Purbeck.
Maternity services include an assessment area, antenatal and postnatal ward, a co-located midwife-led birth centre, delivery suite, and 1 maternity theatre. Between June 2022 and May 2023, 1519 babies were born at the trust. The home birth rate was 5%.
We will publish a report of our overall findings when we have completed the national maternity services inspection programme.
We carried out a 48-hour announced, focused inspection of the maternity service, looking only at the safe and well-led key questions.
The overall location rating for Dorset County Hospital went down as a result of the maternity services ratings. We rated Dorset County Hospital as requires improvement.
How we carried out the inspection
We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.
We visited maternity assessment unit which includes a triage service, delivery suite, the antenatal and postnatal ward, maternity theatre, and general theatres to see where maternity patients would be taken in an emergency if the maternity theatre was in use.
We spoke with 13 midwives, 2 support workers, 6 women and birthing people. We received 27 responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.
We reviewed 10 patient care records, 10 Observation and escalation charts and 4 medicines 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.