- NHS hospital
Luton and Dunstable 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. The hospital's maternity services offer a wide range of specialised care, including consultant-led care, midwifery led care, antenatal clinic, a fetal medicine unit (FMU), a maternity day assessment unit (MDAU), a triage unit, antenatal and postnatal inpatient wards and bereavement services. From April 2024 to March 2025, there were 5358 babies born at Luton and Dunstable Hospital.
We last inspected maternity services at Luton and Dunstable 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 legal regulations in relation to staffing, mandatory training, equipment, culture, clinical waste management and good governance and a section 29a warning notice was served. At this assessment, the service remained in breach of some 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.
As part of our assessment, we visited maternity triage, birth centre, bereavement facilities, maternity day assessment unit (MDAU), antenatal clinic, labour ward, theatre, recovery and the maternity wards.
We rated the service as inadequate due to repeated noncompliance. Staff did not always assess risks to people's health and safety or mitigate them where identified. Staff did not always complete training, skills and drills and appraisals. The service did not always have enough staff and equipment to keep women and babies safe. The service also had a backlog of complaints and incident investigations and actions, and duty of candour. However, the service managed cleanliness well.
Staff did not always report a positive culture, and staff did not always feel able to raise concerns or feel their voices were heard, in addition, staff did not consistently follow current policies. Governance systems were not effective in managing or addressing risks and areas for improvement. However, the trust encouraged and took part in research to improve the service.
Following our follow-up visit on 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 we spoke with indicated that the service provided high quality, compassionate and responsive care. Women consistently reported their privacy and dignity were respected and that midwives were attentive in monitoring them and their babies. Pain relief was offered however, some women experienced delays in the provision of epidurals due to gaps in anesthetists staffing. Overall women reported a positive experience with the service and staff.
Women, and their families knew how to make a complaint and felt that their complaint would be acted on. They did not feel anxious about raising concerns. Women felt involved in planning and decision-making about their care, including when plans needed to change.
Women were able to share their experiences and provide feedback through the local maternal and neonatal voices partnership (MNVP), which also regularly feeds back to the trust.
While the people we spoke with expressed they were happy with their care, our assessment found the care of women did not always meet the expected standards.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) undertakes a national survey annually to look at the experiences of pregnant women and new mothers who used NHS maternity services. The CQC 2024 maternity survey result showed that the trust performed worse and somewhat worse than expected in 8 questions, which is a decline from the 4 questions in 2023.