A computer system used to identify dangerously unwell pregnant women has been getting risk scores wrong for ten months at St George’s Hospital in Tooting – and the problem still isn’t fixed.
St George’s serves pregnant women across Wandsworth, including Putney. It’s one of three major maternity hospitals for South West London and delivers around 5,000 babies a year. If you’re pregnant in Putney, or your wife, partner, daughter, or friend is expecting, there’s a good chance they’re going to St George’s.
Women who gave birth or have had check-ups there since February have been assessed using the faulty system.
The fault means the system has been using the wrong method to assess whether mothers need urgent medical attention – potentially missing warning signs of life-threatening conditions like sepsis and haemorrhage.
When midwives check a pregnant woman’s vital signs – blood pressure, heart rate, temperature – and enter them into the computer, the system should calculate a risk score using a method designed specifically for pregnant women. But the system was displaying NEWS (designed for ordinary hospital patients) rather than MEWS, requiring staff to manually calculate scores instead.
The difference matters because what counts as “normal” changes during pregnancy. Using the wrong scoring system could mean a woman showing early signs of becoming seriously ill doesn’t trigger an alert – or a healthy pregnant woman gets unnecessarily flagged as high-risk.
St George’s classified the problem as “high risk” in internal papers. It was first documented in March 2025 and remains unfixed. The software company Oracle Health is working on a solution but the hospital has been unable to give a definitive date for when it will be completed.
Adding to the concerns, the Trust has not reported the fault to the Care Quality Commission, its regulator, as it is “not expected practice”, even though the unit was under a warning notice for safety failures from the CQC when the IT problems emerged.
How the scoring system works
Midwives regularly check pregnant women’s vital signs: blood pressure, heart rate, breathing rate, temperature, and whether they’re fully conscious.
Each measurement gets a score based on whether it’s normal or worrying. Add up all the scores and you get a total that tells you how sick the woman is. If the total is too high, she needs urgent medical attention.
The problem is that pregnancy changes what “normal” means. A pregnant woman’s heart naturally beats faster. Her blood pressure changes. So there’s a special scoring system called MEWS (Modified Early Warning Score) designed specifically for pregnancy.
But St George’s computer was using a different system called NEWS (National Early Warning Score), which is meant for everyone else in the hospital – not pregnant women.
Using the wrong system could mean:
- A woman showing early signs of sepsis or haemorrhage doesn’t trigger an alert
- Or a healthy pregnant woman gets flagged as high-risk when she’s actually fine
Hospital already in trouble with regulator
St George’s maternity unit is already being closely watched by the health regulator after repeated safety failures.
The Care Quality Commission rated the unit “inadequate” in March 2023. In October 2024, it issued a Warning Notice – one of its most serious enforcement actions – demanding urgent improvements.
The hospital brought in the new computer system in February 2025 while trying to fix these safety problems. Within a month, the IT faults started appearing in internal reports to the board.
St George’s says it is still using workarounds to deal with the fault more than ten months after the system went live.
The trust has added an additional field into maternity documentation to allow midwives to record the correct scores into a patient’s electronic record, and have also added in reference text.
This means staff have to manually enter the correct score in a separate field – a workaround rather than a proper fix.
The software company, Oracle Health (which acquired Epic Systems), is apparently working on a solution but the hospital says it has no date for completion.
The trust claims that despite the problems no patients have come to harm and it continues to meet regularly with Oracle Health.
St George’s has admitted it did not formally alert the Care Quality Commission about the IT problems, despite the regulator monitoring the unit because of serious safety failures, although it has alerted both the local Integrated Care Board (ICB) and NHS England.
The hospital’s own board papers have classified the IT faults as “high risk” – a rating that typically requires regulatory notification.
Other problems with the system
The wrong risk scores aren’t the only issue. Hospital papers documented two other problems:
Birth monitoring records on USB sticks: During labour, women have a monitor strapped to their belly that tracks the baby’s heartbeat and shows whether the baby is coping with contractions. The printout from this monitor – called a CTG trace – is crucial. Doctors use it to decide whether labour can continue or whether the baby needs to be delivered urgently.
The computer system couldn’t store these traces properly. So staff had to save them to USB memory sticks instead.
This creates obvious risks: USB sticks get lost. They’re not encrypted, so anyone who finds one can see the medical data. There’s also the fact that adding delay and process in the middle of labour makes things harder and more complicated at a time when quick decisions are often crucial.
There’s also no guarantee the information saved this way gets properly filed in the patient’s permanent record.
Papers show this problem existed from March onwards and was marked “unresolved” month after month.
Missing patient records: Over 1,400 patient records got stuck when the hospital was trying to transfer information from the old computer system to the new one. As of September, they were still stuck – neither properly accessible in the old system nor available in the new one.
This meant midwives and doctors couldn’t easily see women’s full medical histories. They might miss important information about previous pregnancies, complications, or health conditions.
By September, hospital papers listed 43 outstanding IT support tickets for problems with the maternity system.
Questions that remain
- How many women had their risk assessed using the wrong method?
- When exactly were NHS England and the ICB told about the problems?
- When did Oracle Health first acknowledge these were system faults?
- What is Oracle Health doing to fix the problems, and why is there no completion date?
- Should “High Risk” IT faults affecting patient monitoring have been reported to the CQC?
- Are other hospitals using the same Oracle Health system having the same problems?
- Why did it take until September for the MEWS fault to appear in board papers if the system went live in February?
Board didn’t ask questions
Staff documented the IT faults in papers for the hospital board month after month. They marked them “high risk.” But meeting minutes show the board never discussed them.
In September, when the medical director mentioned “teething problems,” no board member asked what the problems actually were – even though the papers for that same meeting contained detailed information about wrong risk scores, USB stick workarounds, and 1,400 stuck patient records.
In November, the papers put the IT faults in the “key messages” section – the most prominent part designed to grab directors’ attention. The board had a long discussion about maternity services. But the minutes show they never mentioned the IT problems.
Out of five board meetings between March and November, three show no discussion of maternity IT problems in the minutes – even though every meeting’s papers documented them.
Board papers are only useful if board members actually read them and ask questions.
If you gave birth at St George’s this year
If you gave birth at St George’s between February and December 2025:
What happened: The computer system used to assess whether you needed urgent care may have been using the wrong scoring method. The hospital says it used workarounds and that no patients came to harm.
What to do:
- If you have concerns about your care, you can request your medical records from St George’s by calling 020 8672 1255
- To raise concerns, contact the hospital’s Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) on 020 8725 2453 or email pals@stgeorges.nhs.uk.
- You can also contact the Care Quality Commission at cqc.org.uk
Other maternity options: Putney residents can also access maternity services at:
- Kingston Hospital (antenatal care often at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton)
- Chelsea & Westminster Hospital
Update – Wed 17 Dec: This article has been updated to clarify how the computer system fault affected risk score calculations. An earlier version stated the system “had been using” the wrong scoring method. The story now more accurately reflects that the system was displaying the NEWS interface rather than MEWS, which meant staff had to manually calculate scores. This does not change the core findings: the system has not been working properly for ten months, the issue is classified as “high risk” by the hospital, and there is still no completion date for a fix.
