HOSPITAL bosses have denied they failed to listen to concerned staff following a damning inspection into the county's maternity services.

Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust was accused of "smugness" over its response to an inspection which found concerning staffing issues at Worcestershire Royal Hospital and that midwives did not feel comfortable raising concerns.

Bromsgrove councillor Kit Taylor said he was "concerned and disturbed" by the results of the inspection and accused NHS bosses of "smugness" over their failure to accept responsibility for the problems highlighted in the CQC's report.

Cllr Taylor said women giving birth in the county's hospitals should be given a "Rolls Royce rather than a Mondeo service" adding that the issues made it was clear that concerned staff were not being listened to.

“Has there been a leadership acknowledgement of a leadership failure?" he said.

“If you have got staff that are saying morale is low and a lot of staff are saying there is a problem, somebody somewhere is not listening to them.

“The nurses who are at the sharp end, should be listened to and I don’t really think there is a great deal of listening to," he told Worcestershire County Council's health overview and scrutiny committee on Wednesday (March 10).

The report by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) based on an inspection in December downgraded the hospital’s maternity services from ‘safe’ to ‘requires improvement’ following the inspection highlighting that around a quarter of staff had not completed mandatory training.

The unannounced inspection came after several members of staff blew the whistle over safety in the department.

The report did say that staff at the hospital worked as a team to give mothers and babies good care and had effective prevention and control measures for infection.

Vicky Morris, the trust's chief nursing officer, accepted that staff were under pressure and that improvements could be made in some areas but dismissed Cllr Taylor's claim that the hospital's leadership had failed.

“There are absolutely areas where we can make improvements but making a generic statement that they have failed is not the position and actually we have made sure that services have been safe throughout this time," she told the committee.

“It is absolutely important that as leaders at all levels, accept where issues have fallen down and I think what I was trying to put across is that, in listening to the concerns, then absolutely actions were taken each and every day with the systems and processes that were in place.

“However, what wasn’t happening as well as it could have been was actually feeding back to staff about what actions were being taken to ensure that we met the minimum staffing levels.

“Were staff under pressure during that period of time? Yes they were and they were anxious about making sure they were providing the best service for mothers and families and that is what they were concerned about.

“Each and every time we made sure that we met those safe staffing levels that the actions we were doing to make sure we did that were not fully understood by all members of the team and that is the leadership challenge and the lessons that we need to demonstrate."

The county’s maternity service was last inspected in June 2018 and was rated ‘good’ overall by the CQC.

Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust's overall rating remained unchanged as 'requires improvement' following the December inspection.

The hospital trust was moved out of special measures in September last year after nearly five years.

The trust was told it must make improvements which include listening to staff, monitoring staffing levels and reporting and learning from all incidents.

The trust added that the drop in the rating of its maternity services was “disappointing” but changes had already been made to address staffing issues before the inspection.

Ten new midwives would be recruited by the end of February, the trust said.