Epsom General Hospital

Ratings - Maternity

• Overall

  Good

• Safe

  Good

• Effective

  Good

• Caring

  Good

• Responsive

  Outstanding

• Well-led

  Good

Our view of the service

Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust provide maternity services at both the Epsom General Hospital and St Helier Hospital sites. From November 2024 to October 2025 there were 1639 babies born at Epsom General Hospital.

We last inspected maternity services at Epsom General Hospital on 29-30 August 2023. This was a focused inspection of safe and well-led as part of our national maternity inspection programme. We rated the maternity service at this inspection as requires improvement overall.

We conducted this unannounced focused assessment on 2 and 3 December 2025 to follow-up on the 2023 inspection findings. As this was a focused assessment, we only looked at the safe and well led domains. There were no breaches of regulation.

We visited the following areas as part of the assessment: maternity assessment unit, antenatal clinic, triage, labour ward, theatres, recovery and the maternity ward. We also looked at bereavement facilities. We spoke with members of the maternity team including maternity assistants, junior doctors, registrars, consultant obstetricians and anaesthetists, band 6 and 7 midwives, specialist midwives, safeguarding midwives, matrons and the quadrumvirate.

We rated the service as good. The service has made improvements and is no longer in breach of the regulation for good governance. The service now had enough appropriately trained midwifery and medical staff to keep women and babies safe, involved women to understand and manage risks, managed records effectively and 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 all staff receiving appropriate triage training. 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 6 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 provide feedback about their experiences through the local maternity and neonatal voices partnership (MNVP) and the service’s friend and family test (FFT).

The service took part and performed well in the Care Quality Commission (CQC) maternity survey 2025. The service performed at about the same level as other trusts in 19 questions, somewhat better than expected in 1 question, better than expected in 1 question and much better than expected in 1 question.