A hospital trust boss briefed councillors on the work being done to improve a maternity department rated “inadequate” by health inspectors.

Deborah Sanders, chief executive of Barnet Hospital, said a “comprehensive plan” was in place to address problems in maternity services at the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead.

But at a meeting of the health overview and scrutiny committee on Monday, councillors continued to raise concerns over items on the department’s risk register – three of which dated back to 2014 – and called for a further report into the matter.

Care watchdog the Care Quality Commission (CQC) told Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust to make “significant and immediate improvements” to maternity services at the hospital after rating them “inadequate” in a report published in January.

It followed an inspection carried out in October last year, after concerns were raised following the death of a pregnant woman in February.

Speaking during the meeting, Ms Sanders said: “We know this will cause a lot of concern to women and families in our community. We have put a comprehensive plan in place.”

She told councillors a lot of work had been done to improve how the hospital trust communicates with women who do not have English as their first language, in response to concerns highlighted by the CQC.

Face-to-face staff briefings are now held using Microsoft Teams, she added, with medics keeping a log to ensure everyone has attended and has the information they need.

The trust has replaced a letter format that missed out an apology to women and families when things went wrong, Ms Sanders said, in response to further concerns flagged up by inspectors.

She added that “a lot of work” had been done to fix an issue at the Royal Free, in which staff were using paper records instead of an electronic system used at Barnet Hospital.

Following the briefing, Labour leader Cllr Barry Rawlings (Coppetts) raised concerns over items on the department risk register that were still there “many years later”.

Ms Sanders said one item was related to being able to extract data from the IT system. “We can’t automatically extract that data without being able to manually check it,” she explained. “We have just not been able to resolve that.”

But Cllr Geof Cooke (Labour, Woodhouse) said it was “alarming” that an issue on the risk register dating back to 2014 was apparently being “tolerated” and people instructed “to work around it”.

“We have to manually check the data that comes into the quality dashboard,” Ms Sanders replied. “It has been on the risk register for some time. We have mitigated the risk and should have moved it off the register, because it is mitigated by manual processes.”

She added that the trust had not been able to find an IT solution to fix the problem.

“What I can assure you is that because we do so much checking of the data, the data is robust, even though we have had to manually validate it,” Ms Sanders said.

But Cllr Cooke was unhappy with the response and called for a written report into the issue.

Ms Sanders agreed to produce a report and chairman Cllr Alison Cornelius (Conservative, Totteridge) requested that it be presented to a meeting of the committee in May.