Closure of Stroud Maternity 26 June 26
Dear Matthew,
Following reports from a number of our members that Stroud Maternity Unit was closed on Friday evening for births and antenatal appointments I wanted to write to you directly.
We understand that some women were unable to access their planned place of birth, and others were required to travel to Gloucestershire Royal Hospital for antenatal appointments instead.
If accurate, this raises immediate and serious questions about the safety, resilience and credibility of the proposed new model for community birth across Gloucestershire, particularly today, the day the consultation on that model is being launched.
Our understanding is that the closure may have been due to midwife shortages at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital. If Stroud Maternity Unit staff are being pulled away from Stroud to cover shortages in the acute unit, then community birth has not been ring-fenced. It has been made dependent on the staffing pressures of Gloucestershire Royal Hospital.
This highlights one of our major safety concerns about the proposal to stretch Stroud midwives across all community births, including Stroud, Cheltenham and home births across the county.
If midwives from Stroud Maternity Unit are already being drafted to cover hospital shortages, what strengthening is actually being put in place to protect and ring-fence community birth?
How can the 4th midwife for your model be reliably available for a 2nd community birth?
At HOSC, it was stated that the proposed community model could easily be increased as capacity for home birth rises. However, what we are seeing on the ground is the opposite: increasing centralisation, reduced access to community-based care, and no clear evidence that staffing for community birth is being protected.
This also seems an important time to raise the issue of continuity of care. Under the proposed model, continuity in the community appears to be non-existent. This is deeply concerning given the evidence that continuity of midwifery care improves safety, increases satisfaction for women and families, and supports retention and morale among midwives.
The final Ockenden report into Nottingham maternity services, published this month, should be a serious warning to every maternity system in England. One of the clearest lessons is that maternity safety cannot be separated from culture, staffing, communication, listening to women and continuity of care.
A fragmented model, where women are passed between services and midwives are stretched across multiple sites and functions, creates exactly the kind of unsafe conditions that major maternity reviews repeatedly warn against. Women are less likely to be known, concerns are more easily missed, and midwives are placed under impossible pressure.
Gloucestershire must not respond to national maternity failures by designing a model that further fragments community care. The lesson from Ockenden 2026 should be to strengthen local, relational, properly staffed maternity services — not to centralise risk and call it transformation.
Of course today we also await the Amos report which directly includes Gloucestershire Hospital and we wonder how these findings will shape your final plan for improvements I maternity care.
We appreciate that there is planning underway towards reinstating a home birth team. However, the current proposal appears unsafe for women, unsafe for midwives, and practically unworkable.
Community birth cannot be safely rebuilt by stretching already depleted staff across an ever-wider geographical area, while still allowing those same staff to be pulled back into the hospital when acute staffing pressures arise.
Continuity is not a luxury or an optional enhancement. It is one of the foundations of safe maternity care: a woman and her midwife, with input from the wider obstetric, neonatal and hospital teams when needed. Each woman should be supported to make informed decisions about how and where she gives birth, with care that is relational, informed and consistent.
When women are supported by known midwives, trust develops, compassion happens naturally, and care becomes safer. Women are more likely to feel heard, midwives are more likely to understand the context of each woman’s care, and concerns are less likely to be missed or dismissed.
A model that relies on already stretched community midwives being pulled across Stroud, Cheltenham, Gloucester and countywide home births — while also being vulnerable to redeployment into the acute unit — is not a strengthened community model. It is centralisation by another route.
We are therefore asking for urgent clarification on the following:
Was Stroud Maternity Unit closed for births and antenatal appointments on Friday evening?
If so, what was the reason for the closure?
Were Stroud staff redeployed to cover staffing shortages at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital?
How many women were affected, including those planning to birth at Stroud and those attending antenatal appointments?
What safeguards are now being put in place in the new plan to ensure Stroud Maternity Unit, Cheltenham birth provision and home birth services are genuinely ring-fenced. For example can staff from GRH be drafted to cover shortages at Stroud?
Have models for safe, local, continuous midwifery care rather than simply centralisation & fragmentation been considered?
How does the proposed model respond to the findings and warnings of Ockenden 2026 around culture, listening, staffing, communication and continuity?
Given that the consultation on the proposed new community birth model is due to be launched today, and given our serious concerns that this is a box-ticking exercise rather than true co-development, I would like to propose an in-person meeting with you.
We need to understand how the Trust has arrived at this model, why continuity of care has not been placed at the centre of the proposal, and how community birth will be genuinely protected if the same midwives can still be pulled away to cover pressures elsewhere.
A consultation is not meaningful if women and families are only being asked to respond to a preferred model after the core decisions have already been made. We are asking for a direct conversation about the evidence, the staffing assumptions, the alternatives considered, and why a continuity-based community model has not been developed.
This closure of Stroud Maternity Unit, even temporarily, is not a minor operational issue. It is evidence of the very risk we have been warning about: that community birth services are being treated as flexible capacity for the acute unit, rather than as essential services in their own right which strengthen the entire maternity ecosystem.
I ask that this meeting takes place before the consultation period closes, and early enough for the discussion to meaningfully inform the outcome.
Until these questions are answered, and until the evidence behind the proposed model is made public, we do not believe the consultation can be considered fully informed or meaningful.
Kind regards,
Emma Gleave
Gloucestershire Maternity Action Group