The health watchdog has been accused of unnecessarily worrying expectant parents after publishing a report on maternity services so late that the poor rating they gave was already “irrelevant”. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) published a report on January 3 covering maternity services at Broomfield Hospital despite the inspection actually being carried out in March last year.
The inspection saw the maternity service’s overall rating decline from requires improvement to inadequate. However, a follow-up inspection in July showed that some improvements have been implemented since then. The results of that inspection will be published shortly.
The CQC has since apologised for the delay, which “falls far short of what people using services and the trust should be able to expect,” blaming changes to its technology. Chairman of the Health Overview Policy & Scrutiny Committee Councillor Jeff Henry said the length of time taken to publish may have led to parents’ being “scared to death” despite improvements being made since.
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He said: “It feels strange that the grading is set to the March report when there has been a subsequent visit in July, which will have seen significant improvements. There may be young families out there preparing to have a child who have been scared to death with this kind of information being landed on the doorstep of the maternity wards.”
He added: “It is certainly not helpful for our colleagues in hospital trusts to have a ten month delay on a report. I would expect 10 months down the line, most of the stuff in the report would be irrelevant because they should have done that and tackled that.”
The delay in maternity services comes after the CQC took five months to publish a report into medical care at the whole Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust in 2023. Between the January inspection and its publication in mid-June, the trust said “significant improvements” were made to inpatient environments.
Councillor Henry added that by the time it was published that “very many of the aspects that they had mentioned in their report had been improved on”. “For staff, it felt like a smack in the face,” Councillor Henry added.
The initial inspection in March 2024 found concerns about triage times and capacity to support women, people using the service and their babies. It issued the trust with a demand to ensure rapid improvement.
Since the inspection, CQC has seen some improvements in these areas, including at the July inspection, which will be reflected in the subsequent report. The CQC has apologised for the time it took to publish.
A spokesman said: “Due to a large-scale transformation programme at CQC, this report was not published as soon after the inspection as it should have been. The programme involved changes to the technology CQC uses but resulted in problems with the systems and processes rather than the intended benefits.
“The amount of time taken to publish this report falls far short of what people using services and the trust should be able to expect, and CQC apologises for this. While publication of some reports has been delayed, any immediate action that CQC needed to take to protect people using services will not have been affected and acted on appropriately. CQC is taking urgent steps to ensure that inspection reports are published in a much more timely manner.”