Hospital where mothers risk taking home the wrong baby
AN NHS hospital has been ordered to improve security on its maternity ward after inspectors found mothers ‘might leave the unit with the wrong baby’.
Some newborns at The Royal London Hospital had no name tag, creating a ‘risk a baby might receive medication intended for another’ or be taken home by the wrong family, the Care Quality Commission said.
Inspectors also said that the checking of name bands was ‘lax’.
Even the head of midwifery at the hospital, in Whitechapel, east London, was unaware of a baby abduction policy, the regulator said.
Inspectors found there were not enough midwives on the delivery suite to provide safe cover for all women.
But midwives said they had been ordered by managers not to raise concerns about low staff numbers.
There was a ‘mixed’ view about how caring staff were. One mother told inspectors she was treated as ‘childish’ because she was upset that her baby had been taken into special care.
Inspectors, who visited the hospital in July this year, said they also observed some ‘intracultural issues and some bullying behaviour’ both between groups of midwives and between midwives and patients.
Staff on the postnatal ward referred to patients by their bed numbers rather than by name, the CQC said.
Last year 4,645 babies were born at the hospital, which is the largest stand-alone acute hospital building in Europe.
The CQC has ordered the Barts Health NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, to ‘urgently’ improve security in maternity after rating the unit ‘ inadequate’. The trust said it had already taken steps to address baby safety concerns – including introducing new ID tags.
Overall the hospital was rated ‘requires improvement’. The report also highlighted: ÷Frequent problems with insuf-
‘Inadequate staffing’
ficient availability of sterile equipment in theatres; ÷A two-week backlog of outpatient appointments waiting to be booked – and some patients waiting more than a year for follow-up appointments; ÷In some busy departments, patients’ nutrition and hydra- tion needs were met with the help of their relatives; ÷Nine preventable errors – socalled ‘ never events’ were reported between August 2015 and July 2016, including a surgeon leaving an object inside a patient during an operation; ÷Some patients in A&E had to wait an hour and 20 minutes for an initial assessment from a medic, despite national guidance suggesting the majority should be assessed by a clinician within 15 minutes; ÷Some medics had to complete mandatory training in their own time or as part of holiday leave.
Professor Sir Mike Richards, the CQC’s chief inspector of hospitals, said: ‘ We were most concerned about the standard of care around maternity and gynaecology services.
‘Staffing on maternity wards was sometimes inadequately covered – but most worrying of all was the lack of a safe and secure environment for newborn babies. At the time of our inspection, we raised this with the Royal London Hospital as a matter for their urgent attention.’
A trust spokesman said: ‘We acted immediately to improve the security of babies … these reports are based on observations from five months ago.
‘Since then we have subjected our processes and procedures to forensic scrutiny … Women should be assured our services are safe and we will review our processes regularly to ensure they remain safe.’