Maternity Safety Strategy

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 28th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I am happy to do that and am most grateful for that very generous offer.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am sure that the Secretary of State will realise that, even after all these years, when my wife and I hear news like what we heard this morning, it takes us back to our first baby daughter, who died at birth. After that, we had four healthy children and 10 grandchildren, but we still go back to that awful time. Our baby was sickly; it was not about poor care. We care very much about people who lose their children. As a constituency Member of Parliament, I am getting increasingly worried about rationalisations in which maternity units get further and further away from where the main population live. I also get very worried when we do not give our midwives and doctors our full support to give them the morale to do that difficult job.

[Mr Hunt]

We must give doctors, nurses and midwives our full support, because they do an extraordinary job. Sometimes there are difficult issues and the centralisation of certain maternity services can improve patient safety if it means that there is round-the-clock consultant cover and so on. In my experience, the most important thing is to spot the most risky births early in the process. I am not a doctor, but there is sometimes an assumption that it is all about what happens at the moment of labour when women go into hospital. Actually, a lot of this is about thinking earlier in the process about higher risk mums—mums who smoke and mums from lower socioeconomic backgrounds—and intervening earlier. That will be important for the hon. Gentleman’s constituents and for mine.