21 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 Goole Hospital.
Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust provides a range of maternity services for women at three acute hospital sites.
We inspected the maternity service at Goole 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.
The Goole Hospital provides maternity services to the population of East Riding. There are high levels of deprivation with North East Lincolnshire being one of the 20% most deprived areas in England and 26% of children living in low income families.
The maternity service at Goole is a small standalone birthing unit which offers a home from home low risk midwifery-led unit, run by community midwifery teams and offering antenatal clinics, and an on-call childbirth service for women and pregnant people who want a step up from a home birth. The unit had one delivery room with a birthing pool. There are no other inpatient obstetric or neonatal services onsite. The unit therefore supports low risk women and birthing people who want a birth in a ‘home away from home’ setting. Those considered high risk are transferred to Scunthorpe General Hospital (the consultant led unit) for delivery.
A weekly obstetric clinic is available for women at Goole District Hospital who meet high risk criteria and need consultant led care closer to home.
Between October 2022 and October 2023, 6 babies were born at Goole and District Hospital midwifery led unit (MLU).
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 location was last inspected under our full comprehensive inspection programme in November 2019. The overall rating was good.
Our rating of this hospital stayed the same. We rated it as Good.
How we carried out the inspection
We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.
We visited the Goole midwifery led unit (MLU).
We spoke with 4 midwives and 1 midwifery support worker. We were unable to speak with any women, birthing people, birthing partners or relatives. We received no responses to our give feedback on care posters which were provided to the service to display and share with people during the inspection.
We reviewed 3 patient care records and 2 medicines records. We also interviewed key members of staff, medical staff and the senior management.
Following our onsite inspection, we spoke with senior leaders who were responsible for the leadership and oversight of 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.