- NHS hospital
St George's Hospital (Tooting)
Assessment report published 28 August 2025
Contents
Ratings - Maternity
Our view of the service
St George’s Hospital is a large teaching hospital in Tooting with 1,300 beds and employs approximately 10,345 staff; serving a population of 1.3 million across Southwest London and surrounding areas. The maternity service provides consultant-led and midwife-led care for both high and low risk women. The hospital's maternity services offer a wide range of specialised care, including a consultant-led labour ward, a birth centre, an outpatient antenatal clinic, a fetal medicine unit (FMU), a maternity day assessment unit, a triage unit, antenatal and postnatal inpatient wards (including transitional care), and bereavement services. From October 2023 to October 2024, there were 4,301 babies born at this hospital.
We inspected the maternity service at St George's Hospital. We last carried out a focused inspection of the maternity service in 2023 as part of our national maternity inspection programme and it was rated inadequate. We carried out an unannounced, comprehensive inspection of the maternity service, looking at all key questions (safe, caring, effective, responsive and well-led). We rated maternity services overall as requires improvement.
Since the last inspection in March 2023, some improvements had been made in specific areas. There was an improvement in the categorisation of incidents and in the provision and facilities for families who experienced bereavement. Staff said the culture and the way multidisciplinary teams reviewed incidents had also improved.
However, despite these improvements, there were still some areas of concern that had not been resolved from the previous inspection:
- Staff did not always complete risk assessment documentation appropriately for each woman or birthing person.
- Medicines were not always managed safely.
- The design, maintenance and use of facilities, premises, and equipment did not always follow safety standards. Some equipment safety checks were out of date and daily checks had not always been completed.
- The service provided mandatory training and appraisals in key skills to all staff but did not always ensure everyone had completed it.
- The service did not have enough maternity staff with the right qualifications, skills, training and experience to keep women safe from avoidable harm and to provide the right care and treatment.
- Staff monitored the effectiveness of care and treatment via audits however, appropriate action was not always taken in response to this.
- There was no stable leadership team within the service.
The service was previously in breach of Regulation 12 (safe care and treatment) of the Health and Social Care Act 2008. Although some improvements had been made, they were insufficient, and the service remained in breach of this regulation. Following the inspection, under Section 29A of the Health and Social Care Act 2008, we issued a warning notice to the provider. We took this action as we believed women, birthing people, or babies would or may be exposed to the risk of harm if we had not done so. In response to the warning notice, the trust made a number of changes to ensure women, birthing people, and babies were safe.
People's experience of this service
Women and birthing people we spoke with as part of the inspection were generally positive about the service and reported they received effective monitoring, and appropriate processes were in place. Staff were described as “very professional and kind”, and “lovely”. The 2024 Care Quality Commission maternity survey scored St George’s Hospital (Tooting) as about the same as other trusts on all 24 questions. Therefore, the responses of people who used this service are comparable to those who have used other services.
Women, birthing people, and their relatives knew how to complain and felt that their complaint would be acted on. Women and birthing people felt involved in planning and making decisions about their care, including when plans had to change. The service had a dedicated and well-equipped bereavement suite to meet the needs of women, birthing people, and their families. Women and birthing people could access care and support when needed. Women and birthing people could access maternity services through their GP, community midwives, self-referral by phone, or an online booking form.
However, the 2023 Wandsworth Health Watch report, which included feedback from 13 women and birthing people who had accessed maternity services in the region including St George’s Hospital, found a significant number of people felt that their ethnicity had negatively influenced the maternity care they received. Experiences documented in the report included feeling like they were not being listened to. This meant that not everyone experienced the same level of care and treatment. The service had developed a maternity strategy and vision which focused on addressing health inequalities within the local population.