UK Birth Centres Ltd is operated by UK Birth Centre’s Limited. It is also known as Private Midwives and provides maternity services in the UK, Ireland and the Channel Islands.

UK Birth Centres Ltd offers packages of care that include antenatal care, birth plans, postnatal care, homemaker and baby support. They also support women with home births, hospital births, private caesarean section and cord blood banking. They do not provide services to women under 18 years old.

The service provides services in Ireland and the Channel Islands which we do not regulate. We inspected all aspects of the maternity service provided in England only.

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology. We carried out an unannounced visit to the service on 28 and 29 November 2018.

To get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment, we ask the same five questions of all services: are they safe, effective, caring, responsive to people's needs, and well-led? Where we have a legal duty to do so we rate services’ performance against each key question as outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate.

Throughout the inspection, we took account of what people told us and how the provider understood and complied with the Mental Capacity Act 2005.

The main service provided by this provider was maternity.

Services we rate

We have not previously rated this service. We rated it as Good overall.

We found good practice in relation to maternity care:

• The service had enough staff with the right qualifications, skills, training and experience to keep women safe from avoidable harm and provide the right care and treatment. Mandatory training compliance was high and managers appraised staff performance annually.

• Incidents were managed safely with a clear reporting process understood by staff. There had been one serious incident between January 2016 and November 2018.

• Staff provided care and treatment based on national guidance to achieve positive outcomes for women. Managers monitored the effectiveness of care and treatment through regular audits. The service invited external specialists to audit care outcomes for women.

• Staff cared for women and their families with compassion and often went the extra mile to support women during home and hospital births. Women we spoke with confirmed that staff were kind, caring and professional and they provided person-centred care.

• The service took account of women’s individual needs. We saw that women were offered bespoke care packages that were individualised and took a holistic account of all their circumstances including social and cultural needs.

• Leaders were visible and approachable and promoted a positive culture that supported and valued staff. Governance arrangements were clearly set out through the quality and safety board and included external oversight from expert clinicians in maternity care.

Following this inspection, we told the provider that it should make improvements, even though a regulation had not been breached, to help the service improve. Details are at the end of the report.

Ellen Armistead

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals (North)