Results of CQC maternity survey 2023 published
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has today published the results of its annual survey of women’s experiences of maternity care in England.
388 people giving birth at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust between 1 and 28 February 2023 were surveyed as part of 19,000 total responses from 121 trusts across the country. The Trust’s response rate was around 31 per cent compared to an overall adjusted response rate of around 43 per cent.
For all but one question, there were no statistically significant changes in our scores compared with the 2022 survey. The question relating to being able to have a support person with you during your care received a significantly improved score (up from 4.1 to 8, out of 10). This is primarily due to changes in policy following the Covid-19 pandemic.
Our results for most of the 54 questions in the survey remained in line with those for the other 120 trusts in England. For the group of questions relating to 'care at home after birth', we performed slightly worse than average, and for the group of questions relating to 'feeding your baby' we fared worse than average.
Commenting on the survey results, Susan Barry, Associate Director of Midwifery, said: “The CQC maternity survey is a key source of feedback from the people using our services and helps give us greater focus for our improvement work. We know we need to do better on our support for feeding and for care at home after birth. In the past year, we have been prioritising recruitment efforts and have been able to bring down our vacancy level for midwives significantly. This is having a positive impact across our services, enabling us to provide greater continuity of care to support women's individual needs.