Stroud Maternity Statement

Stroud Maternity Hospital

We want to be absolutely clear that Stroud Maternity Hospital is not closing and there are no plans to close it.

The Birth Unit remains open and will continue to be an option for midwifery-led care day and night.

We recognise how important safe, accessible maternity care is to women and birthing people and for their continued understanding as we work to reopen our services for everyone, no matter where they live in Gloucestershire.

Home Birth

In November 2025, we advised that the Gloucestershire home birth service would be suspended for at least six months, following safety concerns raised by our staff.

Over the past six months, we have been working to safely reinstate the service across the county and to reopen the midwifery‑led Cheltenham Birth Centre.

Although good progress has been made there is still more to do to be able to reopen safely and therefore our home birth service will remain suspended until the autumn.

We recognise that the suspension of the home birth service means a loss of choice and certainty for families who had planned and hoped to give birth at home.

We are sorry that this is necessary, and we want to thank women, birthing people and our maternity staff across Gloucestershire for their continued patience during what we know has been a deeply frustrating and worrying time.

The work we are doing is to develop the right infrastructure required so that we can reinstate full choice of birth as soon as possible.

Wider Maternity update

As a Trust, we have a responsibility to consider how maternity services are provided for all of Gloucestershire.

Taking an evidence-based approach, a recent assessment of the changing needs of women across Gloucestershire shows how demand for services and the nature of that demand have changed significantly over recent years.

These changes are not unique to Gloucestershire and are replicated across the country, and we must take them into account when considering how services are provided and how staff are trained to provide the best care possible.

A critical part of our work is ensuring we have robust, sustainable staffing for our community maternity services so we can offer a full range of services across the whole of the county, at home, at our midwifery-led birth centres and in hospital.

That is what our work is about: finding ways to reopen maternity services we have had to close for safety reasons, so that the choice of a midwife-led birth is available for families.

Our maternity services must meet the needs of all our diverse communities, address health inequalities and support safe, personalised choice wherever possible across the whole of Gloucestershire.

Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnership

We will continue to provide regular updates through our Improving Our Maternity Services website.

We also encourage anyone who has recently given birth to share their experience with the Gloucestershire Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnership, who act as an independent representative of service users.

We are working closely with them to ensure women’s and birthing people’s experiences directly shape our services.