East Cheshire NHS Trust welcomes the return of maternity services at Macclesfield Hospital

Midwives at Macclesfield Hospital are celebrating the return of full maternity services. It’s over three years since the Board of East Cheshire NHS Trust had to suspend maternity services due to the COVID outbreak in March 2020, and it’s back.

Chief Executive of East Cheshire NHS Trust, Ged Murphy says:

“It gives me great pleasure to share the news that we have now met the robust safety criteria required to return our maternity service.

The return of this service could not have happened without the ongoing support of all our staff and partners, and I would like to express my sincere thanks to everyone who has worked alongside us over the past three years.

“This news is fantastic for families who access our maternity services and our midwifery and obstetric staff who have been working at host sites”  

Kate Daly-Brown, Director of Nursing and Quality for East Cheshire NHS Trust, says:

“As a local resident in East Cheshire I am passionate about our maternity services. I joined the Trust in September 2021 during the period of time when the service were suspended and was incredibly impressed by our exceptionally committed teams who are passionate about providing a quality maternity service for the local population. The team have adopted the catchphrase  ‘Macc is Back!

“I cannot thank our many partners enough – it has been a privilege to work with them over the past three years and to be in a position to return our full hospital maternity service. We are now fully staffed from a midwifery, anaesthetic and neonatal perspective and will be delighted to welcome our new cohort of international midwives over coming months. In preparation our maternity ward has been refurbished and modernised."

When the service was suspended the team of midwives were either relocated to host hospital sites at Stepping Hill, Wythenshawe and Leighton for women who preferred a hospital-setting birth, or remained as community midwives for women who chose a home birth.