Source · CQC inspection

Darlington Memorial Hospital

Provider County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust Type NHS Healthcare Organisation Region North East Last inspected 12 Jun 2026

Overall rating: Good View full CQC report

Domain ratings

Five CQC key questions

Safe

Requires Improvement

Effective

Good

Caring

Good

Responsive

Good

Well-led

Good

Current CQC assessment

Single Assessment Framework

From 2024 CQC rates services through ongoing assessments rather than comprehensive inspections.

Good Assessed 12 June 2026

The service is performing well and meeting our expectations.

County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust provides healthcare services to a population of 650,000 people across County Durham and Darlington, and surrounding areas. It sits within the North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care System (ICS). It is registered to provide the following regulated activities: Treatment of Disease, Disorder or Injury, Surgical Procedures, Diagnostic and Screening Procedures.Darlington Memorial Hospital (DMH) has approximately 433 beds and provides a range of NHS hospital services. This assessment looked at surgery services due to aged rating and emerging risk. We conducted this unannounced …

Ratings by service

Surgery

Requires Improvement

Jun 2025

Urgent and emergency services

Good

Jun 2024

Regulatory breaches & enforcement

Current-framework "must do" equivalent

Breaches of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014, stated verbatim in the CQC assessment.

Warning notice Overall

We took enforcement action and served a Warning Notice under Section 29A of the Health and Social Care Act 2008, which requires the trust to make significant improvement to the quality of healthcare provided.

· 12 Jun 2026 · CQC source

Breaches identified (1)

Breach Safe

We found breaches of the regulations in relation to safe care and treatment, safe staffing and governance.

Regulation: Regulation 12 (Safe care and treatment) · 12 Jun 2026

Earlier inspection findings

pre-2024 framework · 7 must-do 4 should-do

Must-do actions (7)

Legal requirements based on regulation breaches identified during inspection.

Must-do action 1 of 7

Must do

Safe

The service must ensure that staff complete all maternity mandatory training, including but not limited to, role specific training modules and skill and drills.

Regulation: Regulation 18 (2)(a)

⚠ Although we saw some improved compliance since our last inspection, the service still did not make sure everyone completed it. Trust compliance targets for other mandatory training were still not always met. Managers did not always give staff time away from clinical duties to complete training.

Must-do action 2 of 7

Must do

Safe

The service must ensure staff complete all environmental and emergency equipment safety checks in accordance with trust policy.

Regulation: Regulation 15 (1)(e)(2)

⚠ Staff did not always complete environmental safety check and emergency equipment checks, and overall compliance was poor. For example, for the period October to December 2023, the ward adult emergency resuscitation equipment trolley daily check compliance was 62%. The difficult intubation endoscope had expired in August 2023, and latex gloves …

Must-do action 3 of 7

Must do

Safe

The service must ensure that systems and processes for maternity triage are conducted in accordance with national guidance and embedded, so to deliver a safe service.

Regulation: Regulation 17 (2)(a)(b)(c)

⚠ The service recognised the triage process was not yet fully embedded. Staff did not know where to access specific guidelines to be used in accordance with the SOP, for individual diagnosis of presentations such as abdominal pain.

Must-do action 4 of 7

Must do

Well-led

The service must ensure effective governance processes and systems to identify and manage incidents, risk, issues, and performance, are embedded. Progress must be monitored through completion of audits, actions and improvements and reduce the recurrence of incidents and harm, including, but not limited to, delayed inductions of labour.

Regulation: Regulation 17 (1)(2)(a)(b)(e)(f)

⚠ Leaders had revised strategies and systems in place to improve governance processes, although these were not yet fully embedded. The service was compliant with 6 of 10 actions under the maternity incentive scheme (MIS) 2023/2024, and had not met 8 criteria elements from the 10 safety actions. New systems and …

Must-do action 5 of 7

Must do

Safe

The service must ensure there are enough suitably qualified, competent, skilled and experienced midwives in order to provide safe care and treatment across the service and reduce delays in provision of safe care to reduce the risk of harm for women, birthing people, and babies.

Regulation: Regulation 18 (1)

⚠ The service still did not always have enough maternity staff with the right qualifications, skills, training, and experience to ensure safe care and treatment for women, birthing people, and babies. Consistently suboptimal numbers of staff and skill mix remained a concern, and the service could not always provide 1:1 care …

Must-do action 6 of 7

Must do

Safe

The service must ensure the proper and safe storage and management of medicines and there is a robust system in place to ensure service users do not receive expired items and expired medicines.

Regulation: Regulation 12 (2)(g)

⚠ The service did not always use systems and processes to safely prescribe, administer, record and store medicines. Mixed ampoules of injectable emergency medicines were found stored together in a plastic carton and not in original packaging. Ambient room temperatures where medicines were stored were not monitored. Latex gloves were also …

Must-do action 7 of 7

Must do

Safe

The service must ensure controlled drug registers are always completed in accordance with trust policy.

Regulation: Regulation 12 (2)(g)

⚠ On the labour ward, the controlled drug register was not always completed correctly; specifically, administration times for controlled medicines were not recorded consistently.

Should-do actions (4)

Recommended improvements to enhance service quality.

Should-do action 1 of 4

Should do

Safe

The service should consider formal risk assessment of access to emergency resuscitation equipment on PAU.

Should-do action 2 of 4

Should do

Safe

The service should consider formal risk assessment of safestorage of products containing latex, including but not limited to surgical gloves and gauntlets.

Should-do action 3 of 4

Should do

Well-led

The service should continue to define and develop maternity vision and values and work to embed them into practice.

Should-do action 4 of 4

Should do

Well-led

The service should consider ways to strengthen data capture within the trust maternity dashboard.