By Anna Whittaker, Local Democracy Reporter
The chair of Nottingham University Hospital’s board said the trust’s maternity services need to ‘up the pace’ on improvement.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has kept maternity services rated as ‘inadequate’ at the City Hospital and Queen’s Medical Centre, which were first given the rating following a 2020 inspection.
Inspectors found ‘serious problems remain’ in a report published on May 27, which said the maternity units ‘did not have enough staff’ to keep women and babies safe.
Ahead of the publication of the report on May 26, chair Nick Carver admitted that the trust needs to “move more quickly” on improvements to maternity services during NUH’s board meeting.
The trust has paid out millions of pounds in compensation to parents whose babies have died or been injured.
Mr Carver praised the work of Sharon Wallis, Director of Midwifery, and Michelle Rhodes, Chief Nurse, in the meeting – saying they are “the answer, not the problem”.
He said: “I have sat in a number of scrutiny committees where you have been rightfully held to account for the ways that we can improve.
“I am absolutely confident that the CQC report will not say that you are not good news.
“But we need to up the pace, we need to improve more quickly.”
Ms Rhodes said that the Maternity Improvement Plan has 267 actions. 20 of those actions have been ’embedded’.
She said: “We’ve been really cautious about making sure we are thoroughly going through the evidence that has been supplied to us.
“We have commissioned a marketing company who have worked through a plan, we’ve done lots of videos with midwives. We are about to launch that in the next week which will really help with recruiting midwives.
“We know there’s a national shortage of midwives and we’ve got to stand out as being better than elsewhere.
“We’ve met with the university who would be prepared to provide us with more student midwives.”
Non-executive director Clare Urmston, Chief Financial Officer at Anemoi Marine Technologies Limited, said she had recently visited City Hospital’s maternity services.
She said: “I did feel a difference from when I was there a month ago.
“There seemed to be a bit of a buzz, you could hear laughter amongst midwives.
“There’s a lot that we are doing and we accept there’s still a long way to go.
“It does feel that maternity is doing all that we can but we are relying on one or two individuals and we can’t afford to have them burn out.
“We’ve got to make our staff feel safe when they come to work and not surrounded by a stigma of what’s happened in the past.
“We’ve got to draw a line and we’ve got to move forward.”
