Guy's and St Thomas' among the best for maternity care

Maternity care at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust is among the best in London, according to the Care Quality Commission’s annual National Maternity Survey.

The Trust scores well in a number of key categories relating to communication, support and responsiveness of staff caring for women during labour, birth and postnatal care in hospital.

This shows that the maternity team is continuing to build on the improvements achieved in 2015 to ensure that women have a better experience of treatment and care during their time with us.

Some key improvements include:

• ensuring women and their partners are involved as much as they wanted to be in decisions about their care
• staff taking women’s concerns seriously
• ensuring that women are not left alone at a time that worried them and that staff responded promptly to requests for help and support
• confidence and trust in staff.

The survey has also highlighted a number areas in which Guy’s and St Thomas’ need to improve upon. These include the length of time women stayed in hospital after the birth, clarity of communication, and women receiving the information and explanations they needed following the birth of their baby.

Lynne Pacanowski, Director of Midwifery says: “Whilst we are very pleased with the positive improvements, we recognise that there is still work to do and are developing an action plan in response to what women have told us so that we can address the areas where we need to improve.

“A project to improve women’s experience of discharge is already underway and we hope this will reduce the amount of time women are in hospital and ensure they leave us equipped with the information they need to support them in their own recovery and confidently caring for their baby.

“We are constantly striving to improve our maternity services at the Trust, and welcome ongoing feedback from patients to help to achieve this.”