NHS chiefs have decided to shut the maternity unit at a major London hospital in response to a dramatic fall in the birthrate in its area in recent years.
The Royal Free hospital will lose its unit because the number of women having a baby in Camden, the borough in which it is located, has declined by almost 30% since 2019/20.
Health service bosses said the decision had been “difficult” to take but would lead to four other hospitals in the north of the capital providing better care for mothers and babies.
Dozens of consultants and specialist midwives at the Royal Free last year outlined their “significant concerns” about its maternity unit being axed and warned that the move could cost lives.
The closure is part of a reorganisation of maternity care for the 1.8 million residents of Camden, Islington, Barnet, Haringey and Enfield, which has been prompted by the birth rate dropping across the area as a whole by 14% since 2019/20. The process will also lead to services at the Whittington, University College London, Barnet and North Middlesex hospitals being enhanced.
Some but not all of the Royal Free’s maternity staff will be redeployed to those other hospitals.
The North Central London integrated care board – which oversees the NHS in the five boroughs – said the trend meant it no longer needed all five hospitals to host births. It insisted that “the current arrangements cannot continue as they are” and that “this is the right direction in which to go.”.
Dr Josephine Sauvage, a GP and medical director for the ICB’s Start Well maternity review, said the reconfiguration of care would provide “the best quality services for babies, children and parents – wherever they are – across our communities.
“We have a declining birth rate in our areas and the need for more complex support for mothers, pregnant people and their babies is growing,” she added.
The Royal Free is a teaching hospital and centre of excellence for various forms of medical care, including cancer, transplant surgery and infectious diseases.
Labour MP Tulip Siddiq, whose Hampstead and Highgate constituency includes the Royal Free, said she was “dismayed” by the decision. “The most marginalised parents in my constituency” would lose out as a result of the closure, she added.
“I know from my own experience that the hospital helps mothers with gestational diabetes,” said Siddiq, whose first child was born there by caesarean section.
The maternity unit would close “eventually”, the ICB said. It did not give an exact date but it is likely to be later this decade.
The Royal Free will also lose its special care baby unit when the maternity unit goes. The number of babies treated there has fallen by 4% every year since 2019/20 and in 2023/24 only 49% of its cots were occupied at any one time, which the ICB said was too few for staff to keep up their skills.
The decision secures the future of the maternity unit at the Whittington hospital in Islington. The ICB had said they would shut it instead if they reprieved the Royal Free unit.
Camden and Islington councils have both shut several primary schools in recent years in response to school rolls falling because of the birth rate.
Edgware birth centre in Barnet will also close as part of the changes, again because too few babies are being born there – just 28 in 2023/24. It will host more antenatal and postnatal care instead.
