The Care Quality Commission
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Stroud Maternity Hospital Also known as Stroud Maternity Unit

Overall: Good read more about inspection ratings

Field Road, Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2JB (01453) 562140

Provided and run by:
Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Important: This service was previously managed by a different provider - see old profile

All Inspections

During an assessment of Maternity

Date of assessment: 16 September 2025

We conducted an on-site, comprehensive assessment of maternity services provided by Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust at Stroud Maternity Hospital. At our last focused inspection in December 2023, where we looked at elements of safe and well-led maternity services were rated as requires improvement. We found breaches of Regulations 12 and 17.

At this assessment we assessed all quality statements from the safe, effective, responsive, caring, and well-led key questions.

We found maternity services had improved from requires improvement to good.

The number of births recorded from November 2024 to October 2025 for Stroud Maternity Hospital was 87.

Safe:

Staff were trained in safeguarding to ensure women and their babies were protected from abuse. Women received 1 to 1 care during labour, and staff assessed each woman’s suitability to give birth at this location to support safe care. While incident investigations were sometimes delayed, and pharmacy support was not available, the service was taking steps to strengthen these areas.

Effective:

Women’s needs were assessed and reviewed, including communication, personal, and health requirements. Care was delivered in line with current evidence and best practice. Individuals had adequate nutrition and hydration, and staff worked with partner agencies to ensure continuity of care and positive outcomes. Health was monitored to support wellbeing, and staff provided clear information to enable informed consent.

Caring:

Women and their families were treated with kindness and compassion. Staff respected privacy and dignity, supported individual preferences, and ensured choice in care. Staff responded promptly to needs. The service mostly supported staff wellbeing.

Responsive:

Women were involved in decisions about their care and received clear, accessible information. They understood how to provide feedback and were confident it would be acted upon. Care was accessible, fair, and non-discriminatory. The service worked to reduce health inequalities through training and feedback, and women were informed of their options, including the right to decline care.

Well led:

Leaders were developing a new strategy to guide staff. Not all senior leaders were visible or approachable. Staff understood their roles and responsibilities. Managers engaged with the local community to improve care and demonstrated openness to new ideas.

During an assessment of the hospital overall

We assessed Stroud Maternity Hospital on the 16 September 2025.

We assessed 1 assessment service group at this location to review the progress made following our last inspection in December 2023 where we found breaches of Regulations 12 and 17. We found the service had made improvements since the last inspection.

Stroud Maternity Hospital is part of Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and they were registered with CQC in April 2010 to deliver the regulated activities: Assessment or medical treatment for persons detained under the Mental Health Act 1983, Diagnostic and screening procedures, Management of supply of blood and blood derived products, Maternity and midwifery services, Surgical procedures, Termination of pregnancies, Treatment of disease, disorder or injury. The service has a Nominated Individual.

At this assessment we assessed the Maternity assessment service group. We assessed 30 quality statements across the safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led key questions.

We visited the following areas as part of the assessment: Antenatal clinic, birthing rooms and closed postnatal beds.

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.

12 December 2023

During an inspection looking at part of the service

This report relates to the ratings and information for maternity services based at Stroud Maternity Unit. Stroud Maternity Unit (SMU) is a standalone unit run by a team of midwives who provided care to women and birthing people with low risk pregnancies in Stroud and the surrounding areas. Any necessary transfers were made to the consultant led unit at Gloucesteshire Royal Hospital, which was 11.5 miles away.

We inspected the maternity service at SMU as part of our national maternity inspection programme. The programme aims to give an up-to-date view of hospital maternity care across the country and help us understand what is working well to support learning and improvement at a local and national level.

Stroud Maternity Unit (SMU) includes a birth centre, antenatal clinic, and conservatory area where additional support services were provided.

We will publish a report of our overall findings when we have completed the national inspection programme.

We carried out a short notice announced, focused inspection of the maternity service, looking only at the safe and well-led key questions.

This location was last inspected under the maternity and gynaecology framework in 2015. Following a consultation process CQC split the assessment of maternity and gynaecology in 2018. As such the historical maternity and gynaecology rating is not comparable to the current maternity inspection and is therefore retired. This means that the resulting rating for Safe and Well-led from this inspection will be the first rating of maternity services for the location. This does not affect the overall Trust level rating.

We rated Stroud Maternity Unit as Requires Improvement:

How we carried out the inspection

We provided the service with 3 working days’ notice of our inspection.

We visited the antenatal clinic, the birth centre, and the closed postnatal bay.

We spoke with the consultant midwife, 1 matron, 4 midwives, 1 maternity support worker, and 1 student midwife. We were unable to speak with any women and birthing people. We received 2 responses to our give feedback on care posters which were in place during the inspection.

We reviewed 5 patient care records and 5 observation and escalation charts.

Following our onsite inspection, we spoke with senior leaders within the service, the maternity safety champions and the Maternity and Neonatal Voice Partnership. We also looked at a wide range of documents including standard operating procedures, guidelines, meeting minutes, risk assessments, recent reported incidents as well as audits and action plans. We then used this information to form our judgements.

You can find further information about how we carry out our inspections on our website: https://www.cqc.org.uk/what-we-do/how-we-do-our-job/what-we-do-inspection.

12 March 2015

During a routine inspection

Stroud Maternity Hospital is one of the hospitals run by Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. It provides maternity services to the local community of Stroud and the surrounding areas. Maternity services are also provided at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital and Cheltenham General Hospital. The service is run by the same management team (within the women’s and children’s division) across the whole of Gloucestershire Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. and, as such, is largely regarded within the trust as one service. For this reason, some duplication within the three reports is inevitable.

Stroud Maternity Hospital is a stand-alone midwife-led unit with 10 beds and is located 11.5 miles from the main obstetric unit at the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital.

We inspected Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust as part of our in-depth hospital inspection programme. The trust was selected as it was an example of a low-risk trust according to our new intelligent monitoring model. The inspection took place on 10–13 and 20 March 2015, and we visited this hospital on 12 March 2015.

Overall, this hospital was rated as good.

The trust’s services are managed through a divisional structure that covers all the hospitals within the trust, with some staff rotating between the three sites; therefore, there are significant similarities between the content of the three location reports.

Our key findings were as follows:

  • There was a good culture of incident reporting, openness and learning.
  • Whilst trust-wide staffing levels were worse than the England average, there were sufficient staff to meet patients’ needs, with one-to-one care provided to all women in labour at Stroud Maternity Hospital.
  • Risks were managed well, including those around access to the maternity unit, and staff were trained to manage care in the event of an obstetric emergency.
  • Infection control risks were not fully addressed, with no process in place to identify whether equipment had been cleaned and was ready for use.
  • Medicines were not securely stored nor held within tamper-proof containers, and staff did not follow the trust’s policy on safe administration of medicines.
  • Staff received training in safeguarding vulnerable adults and children and recognising abuse.

Systems were in place to identify women and babies at risk, including at risk of domestic violence.

The maternity unit employed a lead midwife in safeguarding as well as midwives specialising in substance misuse and teenage pregnancy. These were available for support and advice to midwives working in Stroud and the surrounding community.

  • Care and treatment delivered was evidence based, with policies and guidelines developed in line with national guidance.
  • A wide range of pain relief was available, including massage, essential oils and water.
  • Family of origin questionnaires were completed to identify women at higher risk of sickle cell disease and thalassemia. The percentage of these women being screened at under 10 weeks’ gestation was not reported on the dashboard. However, two audits had identified only 33% of high risk women were completing the family of origin questionnaire, and therefore opportunities for early screening undertaken before 10 weeks’ gestation were missed.
  • The transfer rates to the main obstetric-led unit were reported as marginally below the national average, at 24.6% compared with the national rate of 26.4% as reported in the Birthplace study.
  • Care was seen to be delivered with kindness and compassion. Women were involved in decision making. Patients and their relatives had a good understanding of and described feeling involved in the care.
  • Women were supported to make choices on where to have their babies. The service ran home births as well as births in the maternity unit.
  • Translation services were provided by a telephone translation service. Leaflets were available in alternative languages, although these were not immediately available for midwives to give women but had to be ordered in.
  • The service had a well-defined governance structure with a good connection to the board. Activity, quality and risk were monitored and reported on; however, actions to address risks were not recorded on the risk register. Specialist midwives were employed to support the governance function.
  • Staff actively promoted the Mums Up and Mobile (MUM) project to promote normalityin labour and through supervision women were supported with their birth choices.

We saw several areas of outstanding practice including:

  • Staff actively promoted the Mums Up and Mobile (MUM) project, which had also been presented nationally at midwifery conferences. Through supervision, women were supported with their birth choices.

However, there were also areas of poor practice where the trust needs to make improvements.

Importantly, the trust should:

  • Review the storage of emergency drugs to ensure they are accessible but safely stored, checked and tamper evident.
  • Ensure all staff are trained in the safe storage, handling and administration of medicines.
  • Ensure systems are in place so staff know when equipment has been cleaned and is ready for use.
  • Review the processes to ensure early screening (pre 10 weeks’ gestation) can occur where the need is indicated.
  • Review the timeliness of access to patient information in alternative languages.

Professor Sir Mike Richards, Chief Inspector of Hospitals