Yeovil District 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 Yeovil District Hospital.

We inspected the maternity serviced at Yeovil 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.

Yeovil District Hospital provides maternity services to the population of Yeovil in South Somerset, North and West Dorset, and the Mendips.

Maternity services include an outpatient department, maternity assessment unit, triage, maternity ward for antenatal and postnatal care (Freya Ward), delivery suite, two maternity theatres, bereavement suite, antenatal clinics and an ultrasound department. Between April 2022 to March 2023 there were 1259 births at Yeovil 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.

This was the first time we inspected Yeovil District Hospital maternity services since merger of the two organisations. Our rating of this hospital went down. We rated it as requires improvement because:

• Our rating of inadequate for maternity services changed ratings for the hospital overall. We rated safe as inadequate and well-led as Inadequate.

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

• Musgrove Hospital – https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RH5A8

• Bridgwater Community Hospital - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RH5K6

How we carried out the inspection

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

We visited triage, the labour ward, the antenatal and postnatal wards.

We spoke with 18 staff including obstetric medical staff, midwives of different seniority, support staff and 2 women and birthing people. We received 2 responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.

We reviewed 9 patient care records, 6 observation and escalation charts and 5 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.