State of Care: maternity services

In this final posting in our blog series on the CQC's State of care report, we highlight the regulator's concerns about maternity services.

Chapter 4 (pages 61-65) references the Okenden report but will have been written before the publication of the Kirkup report into East Kent maternity services.

We highlight five key points to note:

• CQC start by saying the pace of progress has been too slow. 
• As of 31 July 2022 their ratings show that the quality of maternity services is getting worse with 6% now rated as inadequate and 32% rated as requires improvement. This means that almost two out of five units is not good enough
• CQC observe that the same concerns are emerging again and again, for example, quality of staff training, poor working relationships between obstetric and midwifery teams and lack of robust risk assessments.
• Deeply embedded inequalities and severe staff shortages are also highlighted by CQC.
• They reference a recent event where they brought together maternity professionals to discuss the challenges they face (both for frontline staff and leaders). 

In conclusion, CQC state that they are prioritising their operations to ensure they and others have an up-to-date and accurate view of the quality and safety of maternity services nationally and their inspection programme will focus on supporting improvements at both a local and national level.

You can read our collection of blogs summarising the key provisions of the CQC's State of care report below:

Social Care

Deprivation of Liberty Protection Safeguards

Learning disability and autism

CQC's State of Care: key messages