Chippenham Community Hospital

Pages 1 to 3 of this report relate to the hospital and the ratings of that location, from page 4 the ratings and information relate to maternity services based at Chippenham Birth Centre (Chippenham Community Hospital).

We inspected the maternity service at Chippenham Birth Centre as part of our national maternity inspection programme. The programme aims to give an up-to-date view of hospital maternity care across the country and help us understand what is working well to support learning and improvement at a local and national level. We will publish a report of our overall findings when we have completed the national inspection programme.

Chippenham Birth Centre is located at a local community hospital, which is managed by another NHS provider and provides maternity services to the population of Chippenham, Frogwell, Pewsham, Corsham, Allington and the surrounding areas. Between March 2023 and October 2023, 46 babies were born at Chippenham Birth Centre.

The service had been closed for intrapartum care during the COVID-19 pandemic and had reopened for births in March 2023. It remained open during this time for antenatal care and clinics.

Maternity services at Chippenham Birth Centre include antenatal, intrapartum (care during labour and birth) and postnatal maternity care. The service has 6 clinic rooms, 3 delivery rooms with ensuite facilities and 2 delivery rooms with a birthing pool. Chippenham Birth Centre is opened daily from 8am to 8pm and opened as required during the night.

We carried out a short notice announced focused inspection of the maternity service, looking only at the safe and well-led key questions.

We had not previously inspected or rated maternity service at Chippenham Birth Centre as a standalone midwifery service. We rated safe as Good and Well-led as Good.

We also inspected 2 other maternity services run by Royal United Hospital Bath NHS Foundation Trust.

Our reports are here:

Frome Birth Centre – https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RD121

Royal United Hospital Bath - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RD130

How we carried out the inspection

We provided the service with 2 working days’ notice of our inspection.

We visited the birth centres and clinic rooms.

We spoke with 3 student midwives, 5 midwives and support workers, 12 women and birthing people and their birthing partners and/or relatives. We received 5 responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.

We reviewed 9 patient care records, 9 ‘observation and escalation’ charts and 9 medicines records.

Following our onsite inspection, we spoke with senior leaders within the service; we also looked at a wide range of documents including standard operating procedures, guidelines, meeting minutes, risk assessments, recent reported incidents as well as audits and action plans. We then used this information to form our judgements.

You can find further information about how we carry out our inspections on our website: https://www.cqc.org.uk/what-we-do/how-we-do-our-job/what-we-do-inspection.