3 April 2025

At Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust we believe in providing the highest quality maternity care for you and your baby. We are excited to announce that in April, the NHS is launching a major survey on experiences of using maternity services. If you gave birth in January or February 2025, you may be invited to give feedback on the quality of care and support you received during your pregnancy, labour and birth, and after you and your baby went home.

Last year, we received 175 responses from mothers who told us what is working well and what we can improve.

Our Director of Midwifery, Alison Werfalli, said: “Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to complete the National Maternity Survey 2024, which helps us to understand women and birthing people’s experience of their antenatal, birth and postnatal journey.

“Our results highlighted that service users receive high levels of care during labour and birth and are treated with dignity and respect. This is a wonderful reflection of our commitment to provide an inclusive and supportive birth environment resulting in an improved maternity experience.

“An area of focus for us is to improve education and services for women, birthing people and their families who require and choose an induction of labour and we look forward to working closely with our service user representatives to improve.

“An area that we have improved is the involvement of birth partners in the planning of care. We have extended our visiting hours for birth partners on all antenatal and postnatal ward environments.

“We are committed to continue improving our services to deliver excellence in maternity care. Thank you to everyone who will take part in this year’s survey.”

If you are invited to take part you will receive a letter with information on how to complete the survey online or on your phone. If you prefer to complete the survey on paper, a paper questionnaire will be sent in a later mailing.

Participation will not affect your care in any way. The survey is confidential, and your responses will not be shared with our staff.

The results will be published in Autumn 2025 and will be used by us to understand what you think of our maternity services and care. What we learn will help us to make improvements to NHS maternity services so we can provide the very best care for you and your baby, and support our local community. Have your say and make a difference to local NHS maternity care.

Read about our recent Baby Friendly, Stage 3 Award

For more information about the survey, please visit http://www.cqc.org.uk/.