Frome Birth Centre (Frome 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 Frome Birth Centre.

We inspected the maternity service at Frome 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.

Frome Birth Centre provides maternity services to the population of Bath, Paulton, Westbury, Warminster and the surrounding areas. The service books approximately 250 women and birthing people for care per year, and from March 2023 to November 2023 there were 53 births at the location.

The service had been closed for intrapartum care during the COVID-19 pandemic and had reopened for births in December 2022. It remained open during this time for antenatal care and clinics.

Maternity services include 2 birthing rooms with 1 birthing pool and a third room can be opened if required. Frome Birth Centre was open 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 Frome Birth Centre as a standalone midwifery service. We rated maternity services as ‘good’ for safe and well-led.

We also inspected 2 other maternity services run by Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Trust. Our reports are here:

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

Chippenham Birth Centre - https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/RD102

How we carried out the inspection

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

We visited the birth centre which provides antenatal, postnatal and intrapartum services.

We spoke with 5 midwives and support workers, 2 women and birthing people. We received 3 responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.

We reviewed 3 patient care records, 3 ‘observation and escalation’ charts and 3 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.