- NHS hospital
Musgrove Park Hospital
Assessment report published 4 September 2026
Ratings - Maternity
Our view of the service
Date of on-site assessment: 23 - 26 February 2026.
We conducted a comprehensive inspection of maternity services at Musgrove Park Hospital including community midwifery services provided by Somerset NHS Foundation Trust.
At our last focused inspection of Somerset NHS Foundation Trust maternity services in November 2023, we looked at elements of safe and well led and maternity services were rated inadequate. We issued a warning notice to improve the safety of women using maternity services at both Yeovil Hospital and Musgrove Park Hospital.
At this assessment we assessed all quality statements in the safe, effective, responsive, caring and well-led key questions. We found breaches of regulation in relation to safe care and treatment.
Maternity services at Musgrove Park Hospital included antenatal clinic, scheduled care, triage, labour ward, theatre, procedure room, antenatal ward (Fern ward) post-natal ward (Willow ward), transitional care, bracken birth centre (which is a midwifery led birthing unit within the hospital), bereavement suite and community midwifery services.
We found maternity services had improved from inadequate to requires improvement. We found the issues in the Warning Notice pertaining to Musgrove Park Hospital had been addressed.
The number of births recorded from April 2025 to February 2026 for Musgrove Park Hospital was 4,314.
People's experience of this service
While most women and their family/partners we spoke with expressed they were happy with their care and felt they were supported by staff, our assessment found elements of their care which did not meet the expected standards.
Women told us they felt safe, well supported and cared for by teams. Comments included “midwives were lovely, very friendly and I had great confidence in them”, “staff always have time to answer questions” and “I was told there were no such thing as silly questions”.
However, some women raised concerns about the environment. Comments included “its very noisy and difficult to get rest”, “I was surprised by how open the ward is, when 1 baby cries it can wake the others” and “it’s difficult for staff to maintain confidentiality due to the close proximity of other patients”.
The results of the CQC Maternity Survey 2025 (women were eligible for the survey if they had a live birth in February and in some cases January 2025) showed in comparison with other trusts, Somerset NHS Foundation Trust scored about the same for 21 questions and better than expected for the remaining 2 questions.
There had been 7 responses to the Friends and Family Test for January and February 2026. Two of these responses related to poor experiences “staff distracted by other things, not able to focus on the correct patient. Staff not freely available to reach out to whilst in maternity triage.” The other related to a long wait in antenatal clinic to see the doctor. The remaining 5 responses were positive “staff were reassuring and made me feel completely at ease. They went above and beyond to ensure I saw my baby straight away and the postnatal care team were lovely too”, “the staff are absolutely fantastic, the nicest set of nurses, doctors and midwives I’ve ever seen in a hospital” and “from start to finish the support from the midwives was incredible. The care they provided was nothing short of brilliant, every step of the way they explained everything and nothing was too much for them”.
Data collected from the maternity and neonatal voices partnership ‘have your say’ between September 2025 and February 2026 showed 21 out of 28 responses contained positive feedback. Somerset maternity and neonatal voices partnership are responsible for providing the voice of women to inform development of maternity and neonatal care in the county. Delays and the environment were recurring themes for the negative feedback including noise and lack of privacy on the ward.
We refer to women in this report, but we recognise that some transgender men, non-binary people and people with variations in sex characteristics (VSC) or who are intersex may also use services and experience some of the same issues.