Obstetric Anaesthesia

The St George’s Maternity Unit is a tertiary referral centre for pregnant women with complex pregnancies. The Unit comprises both low-risk Midwifery and Consultant led units with two theatres and an Obstetric HDU. We also run a  High Risk Obstetric Anaesthetic Clinic for mothers with complex pregnancies which is closely linked to the highly regarded Fetal Medicine Unit and have recently developed a Postnatal Follow Up Clinic service.

Lead Consultant Anaesthetist: Dr Christina Wood

Consultant Anaesthetists: 13
Advanced level trainees/fellows: 3-4 every 6 months

Contact: 0208 725 3317

We run four services together as part of the commitment to Royal College of Anaesthetists ACSA accredited obstetric anaesthesia service:

A round-the-clock emergency service with a dedicated resident and Consultant Obstetric Anaesthetist on call

A planned Caesarean section service on weekdays as part of a dedicated operating list Monday – Friday

A High Risk Clinic runs every Thursday morning

Advanced Level Training in Obstetric Anaesthesia

What we do:

The unit delivered 5161 women in 2015. We performed 2813 anaesthesia procedures (1657 labour epidurals and 1156 theatre cases) in 2015. Around 31% of women who delivered on the unit received epidural analgesia with a dural puncture complication rate of 0.7% which is below the regional average.

Over 80% of requests for epidural analgesia were attended to within 30 minutes and 97% within 1 hour. At follow up, 96% of women found their epidural analgesia satisfactory / excellent and 97% would have epidural analgesia again.

View the feedback for our service since we started collecting comments from families in 2014

For more information about what we provide for labour and operative delivery please follow this link