Maternity and Neonatal Care

Answer from The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Wes Streeting)

Everyone accessing maternity care should be offered a personalised care and support plan, informed by a personalised risk assessment. This is so women have more control over their own care based on what matters to them and their individual needs and preferences, as well as to ensure that every woman understands the risk factors that might arise in her case. A caesarean section is generally a very safe procedure but like any type of surgery it carries a risk of complications. All women should have the confidence of knowing that the doctors and midwives dealing with them are robustly trained to deal with severe complications, including haemorrhage.

Answer from The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Wes Streeting)

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise that issue, and I commend her for the work she is doing in this area. There is a real risk of post-natal depression. Certainly where there have been complications in birth or, worse still, injury or the most unimaginable experience of loss, we need to make sure that women and their partners and the wider families are supported from day one. That does not just mean training and support for staff and making sure that they are doing emotional wellbeing screening; it also means thinking more thoughtfully about estates.

Answer from The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Wes Streeting)

Without pre-empting Baroness Amos’s work, let me say that the hon. Lady is absolutely right. We need to give staff the tools that will enable them to do the job to the best of their ability, and they need the right facilities and environment in which they can work and patients can be cared for. It is completely unacceptable that on top of the other challenges that staff and families face at such an important time—the unique moment of bringing new life into the world—they are having to do so against the backdrop of crumbling estates that the hon. Lady has described.

Answer from The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Wes Streeting)

I will make certain that my Department and the NHS look into what has happened to provision in the hon. Lady’s area, and I will write to her about it. She is quite right about the need to ensure that parents are given high-quality information from the time of conception so that they can make informed decisions about everything from whether to breastfeed through to the steps that they can take in those formative first 1,001 days to secure the best possible outcomes.

Answer from Wes Streeting

In the 18 months for which I have had the privilege of holding this post, we have invested more than £131 million in 122 infrastructure projects across 49 NHS trusts to improve the safety of neonatal care facilities. We have implemented a new programme to reduce the two leading causes of avoidable brain injury during labour. We have piloted Martha’s rule in maternity and neonatal units in 14 trusts across six regions to give patients and families the right to request a second opinion. We have launched a package of initiatives and interventions to reduce the number of still births, brain injuries, neonatal deaths and pre-term births. We have held a culture and leadership programme. We have created targeted tools and schemes to promote midwife retention. We have increased the provision of maternal mental health services to help women.