Samuel Johnson's birthing unit, shut since March 2020, will not reopen. Births stay at Burton, Stoke or home; the blood-test clinics stay in Burton.
The birthing unit at Samuel Johnson Community Hospital in Lichfield is not coming back. The NHS boards covering Staffordshire were asked on 24 September to make its closure permanent. The midwife-led unit has been shut since March 2020.
The same decision covers the matching unit at County Hospital in Stafford. It also keeps two pregnancy blood-test clinics, which used to run in Lichfield, at Queen’s Hospital in Burton, about 13 miles north.
The recommendation is set out in the decision-making business case in the Boards in Common papers for 24 September (item 15, enclosure 12). The meeting brought together NHS Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Integrated Care Board (ICB) and its Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin neighbour, which now meet jointly.
Local outlets that covered the meeting, including the Express & Star, report that the boards approved it. The ICB had not posted the outcome itself by 1 October: its consultation page still says “no decision has yet been made”. We will update this story when the ICB publishes its own decision notice or the minutes.
What the boards were asked to approve
The paper’s single recommendation reads: “make permanent the temporary closure of the birthing services at County Hospital and Samuel Johnson Community Hospital and retain GTT and Anti-D immunoglobulin clinics at Queen’s Hospital, Burton.”
In practice, the business case says:
- the freestanding midwife-led unit in Lichfield will not be reinstated
- women who would have given birth there are offered a consultant-led or midwife-led birth at Queen’s Hospital, Burton, or Royal Stoke University Hospital, about 30 miles north-west, or a home birth
- glucose tolerance tests, which check for diabetes in pregnancy, stay at Burton
- anti-D injections, given at 28 weeks to mothers with a rhesus negative blood group, also stay at Burton
- antenatal and postnatal appointments carry on at Samuel Johnson as now
Why the NHS says the unit cannot reopen
The unit was busy by community standards but small by NHS ones. In 2019/20, the last full year before Covid, it averaged 18 births a month. Stafford’s averaged eight.
The paper cites an earlier review of County Hospital, by a Trust Special Administrator. That review said a unit needs at least 350 births a year to be “clinically and financially viable”. Lichfield’s 18 a month works out at about 216 a year.
Staffing is the other reason. Running the unit safely around the clock would need at least 12.15 full-time-equivalent experienced Band 7 midwives, the paper says. Two midwives had to be present for every birth.
Both trusts have recruited, but many of the new midwives are newly qualified and still in supervised training. The paper says the trusts cannot staff the freestanding units for births while also staffing Burton and Stoke safely.
It also argues that fewer women now qualify for a freestanding unit at all. Those units only take low-risk pregnancies. A 2025 assessment at the trust that runs Royal Stoke found just under 11 per cent of women giving birth there were low risk, down from 29 per cent in 2017/18.
What people said in the consultation
The public consultation ran from 12 May to 3 August 2025. The paper records:
- 1,403 survey responses, 62 of them on the easy read version
- 24 people at public and online events, including two in Lichfield
- 11 sessions at hospitals, family hubs and baby groups, reaching 70 people
- a further 160 responses in a four-week follow-up in February and March 2026
Three concerns came up most:
- travel, especially for people on low incomes or who do not drive
- losing the choice of a midwife-led birth close to home
- extra pressure on the hospitals that take the births instead
The follow-up was added because people in Lichfield raised the lost blood-test clinics. Until 2020, Samuel Johnson offered eight bookable glucose tolerance test slots a week and eight anti-D slots. The paper says the test slots were regularly filled, while the anti-D slots were underused.
What it means for you
The NHS’s own travel analysis says Lichfield women feel this most. For women who used the freestanding units, the journey to give birth goes up by about 14 minutes on average. If every woman needing a blood-test clinic went to Burton, her journey would rise by about 12 minutes.
If you are pregnant now, nothing changes from the past six years. Births have not taken place at Samuel Johnson since March 2020, and your antenatal checks there continue.
Where you can give birth. The ICS’s guide to local birthing services lists Burton and Royal Stoke as the two Staffordshire hospitals with births. Both offer a midwife-led option for low-risk pregnancies. You can also choose a hospital outside the county, such as Good Hope in Sutton Coldfield, about eight miles south. The ICS says around one in four local births in 2019/20 took place outside the area.
Home births were suspended in the pandemic. Both trusts began booking them again from 1 April 2024. Ask your midwife if you want one.
If you need a glucose tolerance test or anti-D, expect to be booked at Queen’s Hospital, Burton.
The ICB says the change costs nothing extra, because the trusts have been staffing maternity this way since 2020. Both trusts will now carry it out, with the ICB overseeing.
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