- NHS hospital
Bedford Hospital
Report from 13 May 2025 assessment
Ratings - Maternity
Our view of the service
Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has maternity services at both the Luton and Dunstable Hospital and Bedford sites. From January to December 2024, there were 2613 babies born at Bedford Hospital. We last inspected maternity services at Bedford hospital on 6-7 November 2023. We conducted a comprehensive inspection of all domains with an overall rating of inadequate. Safe and well-led were rated inadequate, effective and responsive were rated requires improvement and caring was rated good.
The service was previously in breach of regulation in relation to staffing and good governance and a section 29a warning notice was served. At this assessment, the service remained in breach of these regulations along with a new breach in safe care and treatment.
We conducted this unannounced focused assessment on 10 and 11 June 2025 to follow up on the 2023 inspection findings. We also returned to the trust on 15 July 2025 to follow up on the concerns we found on 10 and 11 June. As this was a focused assessment, we did not reassess the effective, responsive and caring domains.
We visited the following areas as part of the assessment:
Triage, day assessment unit, antenatal clinic, labour ward, theatre, recovery and the maternity ward. We also looked at the bereavement facilities.
We rated the service as Inadequate due to repeated non-compliance. Staff did not always assess risks to people's health and safety or mitigate them where identified. Staff did not always complete training, and the service did not always have enough staff to keep women and babies safe. However, the service managed the risk of infection well and managed medication safely.
Staff did not always report a positive culture between staff within the service, and staff did not always feel their voices were heard. Governance systems were not effective in managing or addressing areas for improvement. However, the service encouraged research and worked in partnership with stakeholders to improve the service.
Following our follow-up visit on the 15 July 2025 we imposed conditions under section 31 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 on the registration of maternity services at Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
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
Feedback from women onsite indicated that the service provided high quality, responsive care. Individuals consistently reported that their privacy and dignity were respected and that midwives were attentive in monitoring them and their babies. Pain relief was offered and administered appropriately, contributing to an overall positive experience. Overall women reported a positive experience with the service.
Women had access to contribute and feedback about their experiences through the local maternal and neonatal voices partnership (MNVP) who also fed back to the trust regularly.
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 survey gathers feedback from women about their experiences with maternity services. The trust performed worse and somewhat worse than expected in 8 questions in 2024, which is not an improvement from only 4 questions in 2023.