Jessop Wing, Sheffield: Maternity services upgraded from inadequate - but still branded requires improvement by inspectors

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) lifted all previous "inadequate" ratings at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, including maternity services and urgent and emergency care.

The reinspection came after hospital inspectors found repeated maternity failings and expressed serious concern about the safety of mothers and babies at previous visits in October and November last year.

After the improvements the CQC found in September, none of the trust's services are now rated as "inadequate". Its overall rating remains "requires improvement" as the watchdog's report said more needs to be done to ensure services were safe.

Inspectors visited six of the trust's services during the latest visit, including medical wards and surgery at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital and Northern General Hospital, urgent and emergency care at Northern General Hospital and maternity services at the Jessop Wing.

They found response times and intervention in maternity services had been improved by the introduction of a specific emergency bleep number, after the CQC previously identified difficulties requesting additional assistance when women deteriorated.

The report also said the trust had implemented new and regular audits and reviews to ensure care met fundamental standards, and most services had enough staff with the right qualifications, skills, training and experience to keep patients safe and provide the right care.

Concerns included the fact that the trust had not trained enough staff "to ensure physical restraint was undertaken safely and appropriately". The report said patients "could not always access services when they needed it or receive the right care promptly".

In surgery and medicine, inspectors found the trust had not identified and addressed environmental risks including "unsafe storage of equipment, cleaning supplies and medical gases". They also said there was still a backlog of serious incidents requiring investigation as the trust had not made significant improvement in identifying and reporting them.

In surgery, the CQC said the trust had continued to experience "never events" and had not implemented a consistent approach to ensure staff learn and share lessons from these incidents.

Following the inspection, the trust's overall rating remains as requires improvement. Safety has moved up from inadequate to requires improvement, effective and caring have moved up from requires improvement to good, and responsive and well led remain as requires improvement.

Sarah Dronsfield, CQC head of hospital inspection, said: "We were pleased to see significant improvement regarding how staff assessed and managed the risk to patients including those presenting with the risks a deterioration of physical or mental health.

"The trust had also worked hard to improve culture and most staff told us they felt respected, supported, and valued. Leaders had improved systems to identify and manage risk, issues and performance.

"Throughout our inspection we saw staff treating patients with compassion and kindness and delivered care which respected people's individual needs."

Kirsten Major, chief executive of the trust, said: "It has been one of the most challenging periods the NHS and our trust has experienced with continued Covid, recovery of paused care and increased emergency demand but none of this has stopped staff from making the improvements required in less than eight months because we all want to do the very best for our patients.

"We are not complacent because we know we have more to do but we are on the right track and determined to go even further to embed the positive changes."