Maternity services in Bedfordshire 'remain safe' says hospitals trust despite 'inadequate' rating
Bedford borough councillors were told it was “unhelpful” to talk about maternity services as simply safe or unsafe during a scrutiny meeting on hospital care.
The comment came as Bedford Borough Council’s Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee (Monday, April 13) examined maternity services at Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which are currently rated “inadequate” by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
The report from the Trust said women described care as “high quality, compassionate and responsive”, with 94 per cent rating their experience as good or very good, while additional investment to ensure staffing levels are “safe, sustainable and aligned to the true acuity of our service users”.
The meeting discussed concerns on governance, staff training and incident management issues.
Councillor Graeme Coombes (Conservative, Wixams and Wilstead) said safety is “probably a number one concern of the public”.
“The very last sentence [of your report] is services remain open and safe,” he said.
“But in the CQC report, at the end, they say we serve notice under Section 28 of the Health and Social Care Act… for failing to meet the regulation related to safe care and treatment, and the management and oversight of governance and quality assuring systems.
“The Trust didn’t comply with five of the 10 safety actions in the clinical negligence scheme – they [the CQC] are suggesting that services aren’t safe.
“I don’t want to scaremonger or frighten the public, but we need to be quite clear.
“You’re saying services remain safe, the CQC report suggests otherwise, who’s telling the truth?” he asked.
Trust chief executive David Carter said: “I think probably in many ways it’s unhelpful to talk about it in those terms, and perhaps we shouldn’t use the word in that way.
“Maternity services by their nature are high risk clinical services, they’re high risk services where things will go wrong in all maternity units, we know that.
“In some ways, if you talk about safety our residents might believe that means that those things don’t happen – they do happen. They happen in all maternity units,” he said.
Mr Carter said the Trust and the CQC measured safety in different ways, and the Trust had taken operational decisions during periods of pressure to prioritise frontline staffing, rather than taking staff away for training or appraisals.
“That’s our way of trying to ensure that you can be safe,” he said.
“The way the CQC assesses it is slightly different in saying if you have not done those things then the safety domain clearly is compromised.”
Mr Carter said the Trust assessed safety using a range of measures, including clinical outcomes.
“There’s a number of those which are particularly pertinent, including your stillbirth rate, your neonatal mortality rate, your tear rate, your hemorrhage rate,” he said.
“On those metrics Bedford performs relatively well and it’s not an outlier.”
Liz Lees, chief nurse at the Trust, added: “We just signed off the safety actions for this year, and we’re completely complying for all 10 safety actions.
“That’s something we did in February, and that was signed off by the ICB [Integrated Care Board] board to say we were compliant. [The actions] were all about safety across both units… it’s moved on since then.”