Maternity Units: Bereavement Care

Ben Gummer Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Ben Gummer)]

I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Colchester (Will Quince) and for Eddisbury (Antoinette Sandbach) for coming to the House and raising this important matter in an abnormally well-attended Adjournment debate. They are very brave to have shared their personal experiences, and not only the House but the nation will benefit from that. They have raised the issue just at the right time, and I hope we will be able to incorporate the larger part of what they have said in our policy formulation pretty quickly.

My hon. Friend the Member for Colchester said that he was no expert in this field, and I would beg to differ only with that part of his speech, as he surely is, as are his wife and my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury. My hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter) brought his clinical experience to bear. It is clear from all their comments that there is much to do in this important area. I give an initial commitment that I will try to address all those things in the months ahead.

The description given by my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester of the care at Colchester general hospital is important in two ways. First, he described how care, when it goes well, can completely change what is a traumatic, horrifying experience not into one that is any better but into one that is manageable. Secondly, in relation specifically to that hospital, which has had very serious problems over the past few years, he described how committed and caring the staff are, and how that has shown through in an individual way. Indeed, the experience of Sister Liz Barnes and the rest of the staff at the Rosemary suite should be copied around the country by hospitals that on the face of it, and in other parts of their operations, are performing better than Colchester general hospital. I hope that my hon. Friend will be able to pass back to his hospital and to his constituents the very considerable thanks of the Department and others.

I read the British Medical Journal article, at my hon. Friend’s suggestion. It is a harrowing read. All the stories in it are, by turns, profoundly depressing, shocking and, to someone who is a new father, viscerally arresting, and also uplifting and very beautiful. It contains some very sensible advice about the need for time, for a culture of care, and for careful consideration of parents’ wishes, some distance after the death of a baby, to help us understand how better to look after those who are just entering that most awful place.

My hon. Friend’s first wish was that we look carefully again at the number of bereavement suites around the country. I have already asked officials to look at that. The numbers have increased somewhat since the 2010 survey, so we are now at well over half, but that is nowhere near enough. I will now, as a consequence of his raising this issue, ensure that we get a proper assessment of the number of bereavement suites. Already, all new-build maternity units will have a bereavement suite in the right place. In fact, I intend to toughen up the guidelines so that they are not so much a suggestion, specifically about proximity to the rest of the maternity unit, but something rather more forceful than that. I hope that in finding out how great is the extent of the lack of provision in other hospitals, we can do something to address this in the months ahead.

My hon. Friend raised commissioning and the work of NHS England and local CCGs. My constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, made a point about the mandate. I will look at this carefully in the next few months. The date for the reassessment of the mandate is coming up shortly. However, the Government are undertaking a whole series of other policy initiatives in maternity and in end-of-life care, and this is the right moment to look at many of the issues that my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester and others raised so that we can get a response that is universal but also respects a lot of the different good work that is going on around the country. In producing a national set of guidelines and policy instruments, I want to make sure that we respect the fact that in different parts of the country organic solutions to these terrible challenges have grown out of local will. Those solutions must be respected and, indeed, spread. I would not want to stamp on that by issuing guidance that was too demanding.

My hon. Friend’s points about guidelines on maternity bereavement were expanded on by my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury in terms of counselling. She spoke powerfully of the need to provide equality of care at a distance after the event of a stillbirth or the death of a baby, which is not very usual in the national health service. She highlighted the fact that in some parts of the country this is being done well and in others it is not. That is precisely the kind of variation that we need to eradicate in dealing with the issues which both my hon. Friends raised. My hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury correctly pointed to the study undertaken by the national perinatal epidemiology unit in 2014, “Listening to parents after stillbirth or the death of a baby after birth”, and I hope to be able to draw on the conclusions of that, which broadly support the point that she made, to see how we can eradicate that variation as quickly as possible.

Both my hon. Friends spoke of the contribution of Bliss, Sands, Tommy’s and other sometimes local charities that do remarkable work. In drawing up policy and guidelines, we need to respect that so that we maximise the enormous good will that there is in trying to help people through stillbirth and the death of a baby. The Minister for Small Business, Industry and Enterprise told me of a constituent of hers who had suffered a stillbirth and had started a fundraising campaign which, within weeks, had surpassed by 10 times the amount that she had expected to raise. That is the power of local bodies which, if we can energise and use it, will enable us to do so much more at a national level. In bringing all this together in the months ahead, I hope we will be able to release that energy, passion and commitment, so much of which is born out of personal tragedy, and that we will be able to do far more than I would be able to achieve in Whitehall or all of us would be able to achieve in this place.

Finally, the vocation of bereavement midwives was mentioned by both my hon. Friends. We are increasing the number of midwives. The mandate has been written in such a way—in part by my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich—and I hope that will lead to an increase in the number of midwives who have specialist training in bereavement. I will ensure that I get back to my hon. Friends the Members for Colchester and for Eddisbury with details of how that might be achieved.

Our efforts should go further than that. I spoke today to the chief executive of Health Education England about ensuring that there is training in all clinical areas on dealing with bereavement and providing palliative care. I hope we can do far more for all trainee clinicians, especially those dealing with maternity, so that there is a widespread understanding of the issues and it is not left to a specialist group, but is part of the general training in care that should lie right at the heart of our NHS.

The national health service does not mean anything unless we care for those for whom health is not the end point. It is the selflessness of care that should lie at the heart of our national health service because that is the foundation on which we build medical help. That is no more so than in this case where, at the point of greatest expectation of hope and joy, people experience the deepest sense of tragedy. Once again I thank my hon. Friends for making that plain to all of us in the House this evening, and I hope this might be an Adjournment debate with a difference—that it will produce a real outcome, from which they will hopefully draw some encouragement from what is otherwise an unspeakably terrible experience.

Question put and agreed to.