The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has raised the rating for maternity services at Queen’s Hospital from requires improvement to good, following an inspection in August.
Queen’s Hospital is run by Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust. This inspection was carried out to follow up specific improvements inspectors told the trust to make at a previous inspection in October 2024.
CQC has raised the rating for maternity services at Queen’s Hospital from requires improvement to good for well-led. They have again been rated requires improvement for safe. This inspection didn’t examine effective, caring, or responsive, which remain rated good from the previous inspection.
Following this inspection Queen’s Hospital overall remains rated requires improvement. However, CQC has raised the hospital’s well-led rating from requires improvement to good.
Antoinette Smith, CQC deputy director of hospitals in London, said:
“When we inspected maternity services at Queen’s Hospital, we were pleased to find leaders had made several improvements for the safety of women and people using the service. There was still further to go, but leaders were aware of where issues remained and had plans to address these.
“The service now employed enough midwifery and medical staff to meet people’s needs, and involved people more in their care to understand and manage risks to their safety. People we spoke to said they felt staff were respectful and listened to them.
“Leaders had also improved how quickly people were seen and treated when physically arriving at the hospital. When things went wrong staff reported it, leaders investigated, and they made changes to improve people’s care in future as a result.
“However, the service hadn’t closed all such incidents in a timely manner, which could slow this learning. Some were still being investigated, while others were awaiting reviews. Some people had also experienced delays in accessing their initial midwife appointments early in their pregnancy.
“We found leaders were working to address these remaining issues and mitigate the risks they posed.
“We’ve shared our findings with them, including where there is good practice to continue building on. We’ll continue to monitor the service to ensure existing improvements are embedded and ongoing improvements continue, to ensure women and people using the service are safe.”
Inspectors also found:
- Staff assessed people’s needs and risks thoroughly, to ensure they received care meeting their needs.
- People had easy access to call bells, and staff responded to these quickly.
- Leaders had the skills, experience, and integrity to lead the service well and improve care for women and people using the service.
However:
- The service wasn’t always managing people’s medicines safely. Some outdated prescriptions hadn’t been crossed out on people’s records.
CQC is also publishing a report from an inspection in October 2024 of the maternity services at Queen’s Hospital.
Due to a large-scale transformation programme at CQC, this report did not publish as soon after the inspection as it should have done. The programme involved changes to the technology CQC uses but resulted in problems with the systems and processes rather than the intended benefits. The amount of time taken to publish this report falls far short of what people using services and the trust should be able to expect and CQC apologises for this.
While publication of this report has been delayed, any immediate action that CQC needed to take to protect people using services was not affected. CQC has taken steps to ensure that inspection reports are published in a timelier manner.
The August 2025 inspection report and ratings supersede the report from October 2024.