Home births to resume before Christmas, trust says

Home births in Gloucestershire are expected to resume before Christmas, as a reopening date for a birth unit is yet to be announced.

Cheltenham's Aveta Birth Centre was closed temporarily in 2022 due to staff shortages and a need to ensure safety, Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said, and home births in the county were temporarily suspended in November 2025 following safety concerns.

In May, the trust said progress had been made but there was more to be done to enable the safe reopening of the unit.

The trust has now said it hopes to restart home births by the end of the year after Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspectors said it is "certainly on the right path with maternity".

According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, the trust said in September the birth centre would reopen by the end of autumn.

And there is frustration among some county councillors that there is no reopening date for the unit.

The latest CQC report on the trust, published last month, rated it as "good" - a better outcome than 2022's "requires improvement" - but highlighted increased pressure on maternity staff.

When the report was published, the trust said it had already made changes to its maternity services.

Speaking at Gloucestershire County Council's health overview and scrutiny committee meeting on Tuesday, Al Sheward, deputy chief executive, acknowledged the trust has "got a lot of work still to do".

"There's currently no confirmed reopening date [for the Aveta Birth Centre] but we plan to introduce home birthing before Christmas," he said.

Sheward added a lot of work had been undertaken by the trust, which involved consultations with more than 130 midwives, taking a "considerable" amount of time.

Committee members agreed to keep the Aveta Birth Centre a regular agenda item for their meetings, and councillor Paul Hodgkinson said it was "way too premature" to stop scrutinising the maternity services at the meetings.

"We have to collectively make sure we are holding the NHS to account in a constructive way because there have been so many concerns raised and it has been such a high-profile issue," he said.

Hodgkinson said both he and Cheltenham MP Max Wilkinson are concerned there is no specific date for the Aveta Birth Centre to reopen, as promises were made earlier in the year it would "be in September".

Sheward said he expected to be able to give councillors a much clearer timeline in November.

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