The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has published reports on its most recent inspections of maternity and urgent and emergency care (UEC) services at the Royal Sussex County Hospital (RSCH), in Brighton, which took place in February 2025.
Maternity services there have risen one level in the CQC rankings and are now rated as requires improvement, having achieved upgrades in the safe and well-led inspection domains. However, they were also downgraded from outstanding to good on the effectiveness measure.
UEC retained the same overall requires improvement rating, but has gone down a grade in each of the safe, effective, caring, and well-led domains, from requires improvement to inadequate in the first of those, and from good to requires improvement in the others. Following the visit, ED colleagues worked with the CQC to develop and implement an action plan to improve safety and address immediate concerns the inspectors raised.
RSCH as a whole remains rated as requires improvement.
University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust chief executive officer Dr Andy Heeps said of the ratings: “I’m pleased that people using our Brighton maternity service said staff treated them with compassion and kindness, and that the inspectors observed strong teamwork between doctors, midwives and other healthcare professionals.
“Concerns raised around caesarean sections and service management have been addressed since the visit in February with the introduction extra theatre capacity for election caesarean sections and some important senior appointments.
“Most of the issues the inspectors highlighted in the Brighton emergency department (ED) are familiar to us and have deeply rooted causes – the physical constraints of the department, the sheer level of need that staff have to respond to, and the difficulties of getting patients through our hospitals and discharged into the care of others.
“We have introduced a number of changes since the inspection last winter, to ease those pressures – for example we have recently opened a new medical assessment unit, we are trying to reduce the pressure in A&E by moving patients to other wards at an earlier point, and we have worked with partners to introduce the ‘HALO’ project, which assesses and cares for people outside hospital, potentially avoiding the need for vulnerable people to have to go to A&E in the first place.
“We have made significant changes, and over the summer there have been encouraging signs of progress. But we are under no illusion that the pressures on the local health system are real, and that there will be times when those pressures are hard for both patients and staff to cope with, particularly in emergency care.
“In the longer term, developments such as the Acute Medical Unit that opened this month and the £62 million Acute Floor Reconfiguration project will help us tackle the longstanding issues ED colleagues face around environment, experiences, capacity and flow.”