Wow thank you both. I am not currently in work (SAHM) though in part this is down to my last job not ending well (too much pressure and workload piled on me). It means a lot.
A lot of this is supported in the National Maternity Review but its from different sources, and didn't seem to be critical of the CQC in any way which is a bit of a problem given the fact that it relies on the CQC for its implementation in large amounts. I just think it needs to be looked at from this angle to add weight and accountability to the system.
A bit more info. Sorry if this is boring.
Out of my list of 166 hospitals (which is most of, but not all maternity units in England), 6 units had an overall rating of Inadequate.
What I found fascinating is that out of these 6, two had a rating of outstanding for the caring element of the assessment – a rating that only 10 hospitals achieved.
What got me about that, is it raises a question here: were midwives in providing what seems to be a more caring environment than elsewhere doing so at the expensive or to compensate for other areas not being up to standard?
It is contrary to what I expected to see to be honest. Certainly one of these two had excellent friends and family scores and neither were on my list of hospitals to look at a bit more closely.
Also I mentioned that I had difficulty looking at the midwife ratios, but did manage to at least get some idea of what was going on even if some of these figures were questionable. You would expect that the hospitals with the lowest ratios to be the best rated as a rule. They aren’t.
To me that looks like there are some midwives who are doing great in difficult circumstances. (Yay superhero midwives you seem to show up in the data!)
Overall there also does not generally seem to be a strong correlation between ‘worse’ hospitals from the friends and family scores and their CQC rating. The fact there isn’t a stronger link and there are hospitals with poorer than average friends and family scores and good ratings overall is curious (and perhaps a bit worrying).
And finally, this is included in the national maternity review (as well as some of the other stuff I’ve said, but in a different format and from a different source but I think is well worth repeating or point out from a different perspective).
almost half of CQC inspections of maternity services result in safety assessments that are either ‘inadequate’ (7%) or ‘requires improvement’ (41%), 18 Although maternity and gynaecology services perform second best in these respects of all eight service areas in the CQC’s acute hospital inspections.
This is actually alarming. A lot of these do come down to staffing levels being poor (which is more than a basic ratio, and includes a lack of senior level and specialist midwives as well as sheer numbers) but this is not the only reason given.
On my list of 166, 47 rated Good for safety. 10 inadequate. 67 for Requires improvement. (the difference in percentage between my figures and the national maternity review is probably explained because I removed the ones without much data about friends and family from my list – these tended to be smaller units which seem to score better. I appreciate my data is a little off, and not entirely accurate, but I do think it is showing up patterns enough to merit mentioning and further proper exploration).
23 of those which were rated Good overall, scored requires improvement for safety but got good in every other category. Four of these are high on my ‘Shit List’ and I seriously question whether they are really worthy of Good overall rating due to the caring element being suspect. There are others I think what would fall foul of this but perhaps aren't obvious. And I suspect there are others still who are not getting the credit the midwives there rightly deserve.