A national survey of maternity services has put Wye Valley NHS Trust better than many others in a handful of areas.
The CQC Maternity Survey 2021, which is published today, February 10, was carried out in February last year and involved a total of 151 responses.
It revealed that, compared to results from all Trusts with maternity services that took part in the survey, WVT was better than most Trusts in six key areas:
- Giving information about how Coronavirus would affect their care
- Giving patients the opportunity to ask questions during antenatal check-ups
- Ensuring patients had the opportunity to seek support from staff after the birth while still in hospital
- Giving patients the opportunity to speak to a midwife
- Giving patients information about possible changes to their mental health following birth
- Being available at night, during evenings or on weekends, to give information about feeding a baby
Overall the Trust bettered most other Trusts with regard to the quality of care given at home following a birth.
“These are great results for the Trust, but more importantly, it means the quality of care we are providing to mums and their families is improving,” said Lead Midwife, Abbi Maddox.
“The impact of the pandemic has affected all our services and we’re disappointed that the one area where we have not done so well involves the restrictions we’ve sadly had to introduce which meant partners could not be as involved or stay as much as they would have liked during this period.
“These restrictions are constantly under review and we are now able to offer partners involvement in line with national guidance.
“The Trust continues to strive for excellence within maternity care. The maternity department is continually looking to improve pathways for women and their families – for example, in the coming months we’re supporting the introduction of a pelvic health pathway for woman as well as further investment in the mental health support available for women during pregnancy and beyond.
“We’re constantly striving to improve the care we provide and we will analyse the detail of the results which will feed into improvement plans to ensure we provide the quality of services we’d want for our friends and families,” added Abbi.
