Questions submitted to the Integrated Care Board (ICB) for the 25th March Meeting.

Concerns raised with NHS England.

The trust say they cannot provide a homebirth service due to their staffing pressure - yet this recent FOI request shows they have over £1m in unspent staffing budget.

Independent Midwives who are registered under the NMC - in exactly the same way NHS Employed midwives are could be contract to allow safe / lawful care to continue. It happens in other Trusts up & down the country - so why not here?

Reflections on the Maternity Triage Event

Join G-MAG for £2/£5/£10 per month.

FOI disclosures show that Glos NHS Trust ended the last financial year with over £1,000,000 of its staffing budget unspent…. so why are women being denied their human rights?

Excellent coverage of our HOSC protest & legal action against the Trust, from BBC news.

Homebirth Suspension on ITV News.

We keep hearing NHS Trusts defending their stance to not use Independent Midwives, because their safety cannot be assured - hear what Sarah Jones, IMUK has to say about midwives registration requirements and why using Independent Midwives can pave the way for safer more equitable care for women.

Birth is all over the news day in and day out - dangers inside the NHS / dangers outside the NHS - but how can we find balance?

FOI minutes show startling safety concerns in Gloucestershire’s hospital-based maternity care, yet the response has been to suspend homebirth and restrict Birth Centres.

This article unpacks what the system’s own documents actually say — and why transparency matters now.

Women are accused of making bad decisions, but this mother spent her pregnancy researching doing everything she could to get the safest care possible - find out how she did it.

Two formal complaints have now been submitted: one to Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust regarding the suspension of the home birth service, and another to the Health Overview & Scrutiny Committee for failing in its duty to properly examine the lawfulness of the Trust’s decision. These bodies have serious responsibilities to the public, and when those responsibilities are not met, women are left without safe, lawful access to the care they are entitled to.

G-MAG: Gloucestershire Maternity Actions Group launches in response to the suspension of homebirth services and the dismantling of midwife-led care.

Advocating for lawful, ethical maternity services and women’s human rights across Gloucestershire.

Gloucestershire’s maternity decisions are now being driven by untested assumptions about “risk” — not evidence, not law, and not women’s lived realities.

At the October HOSC meeting, no data was presented, no risk assessments were shared, and no scrutiny took place. Yet midwife-led care was treated as “unsafe,” while the obstetric unit — responsible for nearly £20 million in birth-injury payouts since 2020 — remains unquestioned.

There are two routes women can take: a formal complaint to the Ombudsman, or a simple civil claim to recover the costs you were forced to take on. I’ve created a full Civil Claim Bundle with the key laws and templates to help you do this. You can contact me if you need support.

Birth should never be driven by ideology.
The Guardian’s investigation into extreme freebirth circles is devastating – and it should be. But movements like that don’t appear in a vacuum. They grow because women everywhere are being failed by increasingly medicalised systems that silence physiology and override choice.

Wendy Savage was one of the few obstetricians in the 1980s brave enough to challenge the growing medicalisation of birth. She supported VBAC, home birth and women’s autonomy at a time when these ideas were considered dangerous. Her refusal to back down led to a highly publicised inquiry — the Savage Report — which cleared her entirely and exposed an ideology clash at the heart of maternity care. Wendy’s courage helped shift birth culture in the UK, opening the door for informed consent, physiological birth, and women’s decision-making. Her story is a reminder that rights are easily lost if we stop defending them.

The drastic changes in the maternity culture in Gloucestershire over recent years can in part be explained by a change in leadership. A man who was found in a tribunal to have ‘humiliated’ staff and caused constructive dismissal.

How is it possible to go from such a shocking failure - to another high level £300k+ per year role????