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".
