Mary Reid

I was pretty shocked to hear that Maternity Services at Kingston Hospital have been judged to be amongst the worst in the country.

The Healthcare Commission has assessed all 148 NHS trusts in England, and used 25 different measures to arrive at their judgement. Kingston Hospital lies in the bottom set of 31 hospital trusts, which have been designated 'least well performing'.

You can read the report from the Healthcare Commission here and can download the pdf report on Kingston Hospital here.

A further worry is that all the local alternatives - Epsom, St Peter's, St George's -  are also in the bottom group.

My two sons were both born in Kingston Hospital in the old maternity unit. It was grim, having originally been built, I believe, as a workhouse. So the sparkling new unit built in the 1990s was a wonderful development and made Kingston the first choice for women over a wide area.

I've been aware for some time that things were not as good as they could be. Now this is purely anecdotal on my part, but it seems that they have cut back the number of staff in the unit over the years, whilst increasing the number of deliveries. At the same time they have found it difficult to recruit permanent midwives and have relied too often on agency staff, who, however professional they may be, cannot provide continuity of care.

When  Kingston Hospital held a consultation meeting at the Hook Centre last month they told us that they intended to expand maternity services substantially, effectively wiping out some of the neighbouring services. They needed to recruit many more midwives to do this.

This report must cause us all to stop and ask whether it is wise to increase a service that is, apparently, already failing to deliver (sorry - couldn't resist the pun).