Our Maternity High Dependency Unit (HDU) at Queen’s Hospital has achieved silver in our ward accreditation scheme, becoming the latest to achieve the award.

Our ward accreditation scheme is a way of improving and standardising the quality of care across our hospitals. The programme sets out clear standards and measurements to help our staff understand where they are already delivering fantastic patient care and areas where they need to improve.

The scheme is led by senior nursing staff who assess wards on areas including patient experience, patient safety, staff experience, and efficiency.

Our Chief Nurse Kathryn Halford said: “It was great to share the good news and let the team know they had achieved the silver accreditation. You can clearly see how the teamwork and leadership within the ward has helped to improve patient care and experience.”

Our Maternity HDU is the ninth ward to achieve silver accreditation.

We’re always looking at how we can improve the experience of our patients and following our recent CQC inpatient survey results, we’ve introduced a number of initiatives. This includes patient panels and a review of our ward accreditation patient experience questions, to ensure we capture key feedback.