- NHS hospital
Worthing Hospital
Report from 5 November 2024 assessment
Ratings - Maternity
Our view of the service
We assessed the maternity service at Worthing Hospital on 26 to 27 February 2025. The service forms part of University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust maternity services which also includes the Royal Sussex County Hospital, St Richards Hospital and Princess Royal Hospital.
The service includes early pregnancy care, antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal care. The maternity unit includes an obstetric consultant-led delivery suite, maternity assessment area (triage), and wards for antenatal and postnatal care.
Around 9,000 babies are born in the maternity service across the trust each year. Worthing Hospital accounts for 1929 births reported from February 2024 to January 2025
We carried out an unannounced assessment of the maternity services at Worthing Hospital. We last inspected the maternity services in 2021, when we rated maternity services as requires improvement. We also completed a focused inspection in 2022 which was not rated.
We inspected this service using our single assessment framework and looked at all the key questions and 33 quality statements.
At this assessment we rated this service as Good. We found 2 breaches in the regulations in relation to safe care and treatment and governance.
The breaches related to appropriate management of risks including ligature risk assessments, medicines management and safeguarding training.
We also found breaches in relation to the governance of the service. The breach was in relation to assurance through auditing systems, setting of targets and benchmarking processes.
The service was previously in breach of the legal regulation in relation to Safe Care and Treatment. The service had made improvements and is no longer in breach of regulations in relation to this.
We visited all areas of the maternity department at Worthing Hospital, including the antenatal and postnatal wards, delivery suite, the triage area and the early pregnancy unit.
We spoke with 11 women and relatives. We reviewed 5 patient records. We spoke with more than 10 members of staff which included: consultants, midwives, senior leaders, maternity assistants, administration staff, pharmacists and housekeeping staff.
We refer to women in this report, but we recognise that some transgender men, non-binary women and women with variations in sex characteristics (VSC) or who are intersex may also use services and experience some of the same issues.
We have asked the provider for an action plan in response to the concerns found at this assessment.
People's experience of this service
Women and any family or carers with them were all positive about the staff treating them with warmth and kindness and providing effective care and treatment.
We spoke with 11 women and their relatives on site and reviewed information from a range of sources including the NHS Friends and Family Test (FFT). The FFT is an important tool to help people who use NHS services have the opportunity to provide feedback on their experience. Women had access to contribute and feedback about their experiences through the local Maternal and Neonatal Voices Partnership (MNVP) who also feedback to the trust regularly.
Women told us about the support they had received, and the kindness and compassion shown by staff.
We reviewed the results of the CQC Maternity Survey 2024. The survey gathers feedback from women about their experiences with maternity services. The trust ranked 18th out of 56 in 2024 which was an improvement on 20th in 2023.
Records showed women were given the tests they needed promptly, and they felt staff were on hand if they needed them for help or support. Women said they did not feel anxious about raising concerns.