- NHS hospital
Queen's Hospital
Report from 20 August 2025 assessment
Ratings - Maternity
Our view of the service
Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust is a large provider of acute services, serving a population of approximately 800,000 in outer North East London and Essex. Maternity services are located at the Queen’s Hospital site, the trust supported with the delivery of 7920 babies between October 2023 and October 2024.
We last assessed maternity services at Queens Hospital on 8-9 October 2024. We conducted a comprehensive assessment of all domains and maternity was rated as requires improvement.
We conducted this unannounced focused assessment on 20 August 2025 to follow-up on the 2024 assessment findings. As this was a focused assessment we only looked at the safe and well led domains, where there were breaches of regulation. The assessment did not look at the effective, caring and responsive domains. We visited the following areas as part of the assessment: antenatal clinic, obstetric day assessment unit, triage, labour ward, birth centre and the maternity wards.
We rated the service as good. The service had made improvements and is no longer in breach of the regulation for good governance. The service now had enough midwifery and medical staff to keep women and babies safe, involved women to understand and manage risks, had effective governance processes and leaders who were aware of the risks within the service.
However, the service was in breach of the regulation for safe care and treatment, in relation to incidents and medicines management.
At this assessment we identified a breach of safe care and treatment. We have asked the provider for an action plan in response to the concerns found at this assessment.
We refer to women in this report, but we recognise that some transgender men, non-binary women and women with variations in sex characteristics (VSC) or who are intersex may also use services and experience some of the same issues.
People's experience of this service
We received feedback from 3 women who had used the maternity service. They reported the service provided high quality and responsive care. They felt listened to and involved in their care. Overall women reported a positive experience using the service.
Women had access to contribute and feedback about their experiences through the local maternal and neonatal voices partnership (MNVP), friend and family test (FFT) and the patient experience midwife.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) coordinates a national survey annually to look at the experiences of pregnant women and new mothers who used NHS maternity services. We reviewed the results of the maternity services survey 2024. The trust performed worse and somewhat worse than expected in 6 questions in 2024, which is an improvement from 10 questions in 2023.