Senior staff from Nottingham University Hospitals Trust were told they must make quicker progress in improving maternity services as they faced a barrage of criticism from councillors during a Nottinghamshire County Council health scrutiny meeting. The trust runs Nottingham City Hospital and Queen's Medical Centre, where maternity services were rated 'inadequate' by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in October 2020.
The CQC returned at the beginning of this month and highlighted ongoing issues with an increase in stillbirths, staffing and its triage service. Improvements were also noted, in terms of the quality of care, foetal heartbeat monitoring practice, record keeping and handovers.
A previous CQC visit in April 2021 found that whilst improvements had been made, more work was needed "to ensure safe, high-quality maternity care for all". The health scrutiny committee at the county council has been receiving reports on progress from the trust for the past 10 months but chair Councillor Sue Saddington said at Tuesday's meeting she didn't feel "Queen’s Medical Centre is any safer today than it was a year ago".
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She also told Rupert Egginton, acting chief executive, Sharon Wallis, director of maternity, Keith Girling, medical director and Tiffany Jones, director of communications, who presented information relating to the trust’s maternity improvement plan, that they are "not listening to patients" and "not listening to staff". There were calls again from councillors during the meeting for a public inquiry into baby deaths and injuries at the hospitals.
The trust team presented data relating to the improvement plan which included data indicating that just over half (54%) of staff would recommend it as a place to work as of last November. Mrs Saddington said: "To hear patients are not being listened to and to receive emails from such sad cases, it breaks my heart. It wants a fundamental review, it’s the only way this will ever improve.”
She added that she wants to see the trust make quicker progress, make staff happier and to stop patients from being worried. Councillor Michelle Welsh (Arnold South) spoke at length about her concerns and experiences associated with the hospitals. She said: "I’m led to the conclusion to say that women and babies are not always safe at NUH and this cannot go on.
"I spoke to one woman about her experiences and I remain shocked at the treatment that is going on within your departments. I don’t believe NUH is capable of making improvements to keep women and babies safe in Nottingham. You’ve had years and years to do it and it’s not happened."
Mrs Welsh added that her own experience of having a baby there had left her traumatised. The trust team told the committee that progress had been made in several areas of the maternity improvement plan including the engagement of four new consultants, additional foetal monitoring training, ongoing recruitment, a 24/7 maternity advice line and 150 new electronic observation devices.
Ms Wallis, trust midwifery director, said she had been at the trust since the end of last June and it had been "a baptism of fire". She said: "I understand what has been said about the pace of change because I am constantly frustrated with that. But it has got to be led by the staff themselves to make those changes."
Acting chief executive Mr Egginton said many personal reflections had been made during the meeting and said: "It is our intention to make this the best service we can. Where it hasn't gone right we should apologise and clearly it hasn't gone right in every instance, so please accept our apology. We do know there is a lot to do and we will see gradual moves as we do this."
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