Baby Loss Awareness Week

Debate between Antoinette Sandbach and Victoria Prentis

Tuesday 10th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Antoinette Sandbach (Eddisbury) (Con)]

It a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood). I know exactly how Jack and Sarah feel, because it was the burning desire to see change that motivated me and many others in the all-party parliamentary group on baby loss to work not only to reduce the number of neonatal deaths and stillbirths, but to consider how we can improve things for parents.

When we set up the APPG, saying that we wanted to achieve huge cuts in the number of families affected by all these issues and to put in place a bereavement care pathway seemed to be setting rather a large challenge. I pay enormous tribute not only to Members of this House—it has been a cross-party effort—but to parents and health professionals, who have risen to the challenge set by the APPG and the Department of Health. In a way, I can provide some comfort to a number of Members who have spoken today about miscarriage, for example, because the national bereavement care pathway, which was launched yesterday, in effect addresses loss from conception to up to one year post-birth. That is quite groundbreaking in a number of ways. Pilot schemes in 11 hospital trusts are developing specific pathways to address early miscarriage, late miscarriage and stillbirth, and for those in the very unfortunate situation of having to terminate because of foetal abnormality. I have been encouraged by the willingness of parents to come forward and talk about their experiences as part of the development of these pathways and to share their loss with medical professionals, including the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and the Royal College of Midwives. There has absolutely been cross-working and buy-in for this change.

I am encouraged that the change is being supported by the Department of Health. Pilots are taking place so that lessons can be learned, with the outcome of those lessons applied before things are rolled out more widely and nationally. As somebody who sat in a room with white walls and a sofa that was not anything like a bereavement suite, I know at first hand, as do so many parents who have not been in such facilities, that when one visits a hospital such as Medway Maritime Hospital, which has the most extraordinary facilities, one can see that change is coming. The improvement and change in the past year has, to my mind, been something that I and many professionals did not imagine would happen as quickly as it has and in the way that it has.

I would absolutely support the hon. Member for Nottingham South if she proposed a ten-minute rule Bill to try to effect the change in coronial law that she spoke about. I myself will introduce a ten-minute rule Bill tomorrow on the regulation of foetal dopplers. I will expand on that point tomorrow, but the false reassurance they provide to parents can increase the risk of stillbirth. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince) put forward a Bill in the last Parliament that has now been taken up by my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), and it is due to have its Second Reading on 20 October. There are therefore methods to effect change in this Parliament, and I know that the hon. Member for Nottingham South would find great support in the House for her constituents if she tried to effect the change that they propose. I know that I will be trying to get the Minister’s support tomorrow on the subject of foetal dopplers.

This is Parliament at its best. We are listening to constituents. We understand where there has been a failure in the system, and there is no doubt that the statistics show we need to make changes in this area. I am delighted that the Government have accepted that quickly and have therefore set ambitious targets. The chief executive of my local hospital, the Leighton Hospital, which has an award-winning maternity unit, was able to say to me that they had had 14 fewer deaths this year. That means 14 fewer families in my local areas going through the loss that so many in this House and outside it have seen. At the same time, I should say that the Countess of Chester Hospital is under investigation in relation to 15 baby deaths. There are concerns about care in relation to eight of them. So the perinatal mortality tool is crucial, as is the investigation of these incidents, in order that those lessons are learned, that good practice is shared and that professionals are honest with parents where something has gone wrong; they need to admit that and learn from it so that it does not affect other families. Let us get that open culture; the Health Secretary has talked openly about the need for no-fault investigation, and the need to learn from that culture is incredibly important. The hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), who speaks for the Opposition on this matter, will know of the particular importance of that, because the Countess of Chester serves his area too and this directly affects all our constituents.

I say to the Minister that the huge progress that has been made is encouraging. The charities and colleges yesterday spoke about the great enthusiasm and drive that has come from working collaboratively together. If we can take that and use it, the progress we are starting to make can carry on. We can roll it out into the difficult areas. We know that they exist, so let me mention just two. First, we know that there are big issues in respect of minority ethnic groups that go beyond the hospital setting, often relating to factors in the environment. Those issues fall outside the Department of Health’s remit, but wider working will need to be done to examine how those factors can be addressed and whether or not public health issues arise in their regard.

The second area involves general practitioners. I sent out a freedom of information request to every clinical commissioning group in England, and less than 50% of them provide any form of bereavement counselling, whatever the death. So even not in relation to child loss, a lot of CCGs simply are not commissioning support in the community. Those CCGs have relied on provision from the acute sector, and the next piece of work from the all-party group will need to be on how we take the lessons learned from the acute sector into the primary care sector, because that will end up benefiting not just those who have lost a child, but those who have suffered a loss.

[Victoria Prentis]

The other sector that provides so much of the bereavement care, such as the service I helped open yesterday, is of course the charitable sector. Would my hon. Friend like to comment on whether CCGs should be encouraged to join that sector in funding bereavement counselling, such as that provided by Petals, in the future?

[Antoinette Sandbach]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, and she can probably guess that the reason for my freedom of information request was to put pressure on not only my local services, but services more widely. There is expertise out there that we can build on, but bereavement touches everybody and this Government’s focus on mental health gives us a real opportunity to approach death in a way that minimises its mental health impacts, which can be severe. We can roll out elsewhere the way in which the Department of Health is leading on baby loss and working together with the third sector. This year’s Baby Loss Awareness Week therefore perhaps has a message of hope that has not been present in the past two such debates we have had.