Infant First Aid Training for Parents

Emma Little Pengelly Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd April 2019 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Newton]

Rowena’s story might not have ended so well without the wonderful work of Millie’s Trust and all the other organisations that ensure that people have the training to empower them to take the right action at the right time.

That brings me neatly to the statistics from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, which suggest that 21% of child deaths involve a modifiable factor—something that could have been done to prevent that death. That is quite a significant number of lives that could have been saved if the appropriate action had been taken.

[Emma Little Pengelly (Belfast South) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this important debate. The statistics that she outlines demonstrate how important first aid training could be—it could genuinely save lives. Given the number of agencies and organisations that young parents engage with, from schools and nurseries to GP practices, is there not a good opportunity to signpost the availability of existing courses to parents and raise their awareness of them? In my area, they are available through St John Ambulance and the Red Cross. That would encourage take-up. If parents heard the statistics, very many more would take up the opportunity.

[Sarah Newton]

The hon. Lady makes a very good point. I hope that in our small way—as a result of this debate, the people watching it from outside the Chamber and the media coverage we secure—we will encourage people to take up that opportunity. That is a really good idea.

I have been listening very much to healthcare professionals in my constituency. Dr Simon Robertson, a consultant paediatrician at the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust, told me:

“I have been a consultant general paediatrician for the last 12 years. I see children referred into hospital from their GPs, and the emergency department.

From the view of a general paediatrician a child illness and resuscitation course for all parents makes practical sense for the families and NHS services.

Parents are expected to make important decisions about their children’s health and about seeking medical advice. But we know they find it difficult to work out if their child just has a minor viral illness, or something more serious. Unfortunately not all parents are educationally equipped to read instructions from their red book, NHS Choices or health advice apps like the ‘HandiApp’. For them, we know they really need time and practice in a supportive environment to learn these decision making skills. We repeatedly see this in the families we teach resuscitation to on the wards.

What is needed in my opinion, is a course for all parents and those in child care on how to manage the common emergency problems like choking, diarrhoea and vomiting, a seizure, recognising sepsis, managing a head injury, or in preventing accidents, drowning or cot death. These learnt skills could help keep children safe and healthy, so should be the skills highly valued by families. Vitally, early action may help prevent some medical emergencies deteriorating to life threatening illness.

This can only be good for the health of children, and for children’s acute NHS services.”

I completely agree.

In 2013, the Department for Education undertook a confidential inquiry into maternal and child health in England. It conducted a meticulous audit of deaths of babies and children, and reported identifiable failures in children’s direct care in just over a quarter of deaths, and potentially avoidable factors in a further 43% of deaths. The University of Northampton’s 2017 report “Before Arrival at Hospital: Factors affecting timing of admission to hospital for children with serious infectious illness” stated that parents often find it difficult to access relevant health information or to interpret symptoms, and that it can even be difficult for GPs to determine how serious a case is in the early stages.

I have been working with Cornwall Resus, which was established in 2012 by two paediatric nurses to give parents and carers the necessary skills to empower them to recognise when their baby or child is unwell and to respond appropriately. It runs courses for parents in community centres around Cornwall. Those courses last two to two and a half hours and include practical training on choking and resuscitation using lifelike dummies, with lots of time for questions and discussion at the end. I know that I would not be happy to undertake those actions unless I had practised them on a dummy first; having just looked at instructions or a diagram, I would still be very nervous about the amount of pressure to apply, so using dummies and having practical sessions and reassurance is really important.

--- Later in debate ---

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Hollobone. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) for securing this important debate, and for the various points that she raised. The way she delivered her remarks shows that the care and compassion she displayed as a Minister continues on the Back Benches. We heard from the interventions of several hon. Members how important this issue is for many people.

I approach the debate as the father of a 22-day-old; young Alastair was born three weeks ago yesterday. That is where my interest in this issue comes from. I am now mentioning my son and my wife quite a lot in the Chamber; it seems my soft side is coming out. To compensate, I remind people that when I was first elected, a magazine did a profile of all the Scottish Conservatives who had been elected, in which I was described as “tough as teak”. I have a tough side and a soft side, which I hope to balance in the debate. I was keen to take part in it for personal reasons, but also to explain some of the issues that my constituents face. While I was shocked and disappointed by the Red Cross figures that showed that just 5% of adults had the skills and confidence to provide emergency first aid to infants, I had to accept and admit that I was among the 95% who do not have those skills and have not gone through that training. I probably should have. In the nine months ahead of Alastair’s birth, I thought we had prepared for everything. We bought nursery equipment and new clothes, and even went down to the detail of how we would introduce our child to our dog. Those are all things we thought about, and it was only when this debate appeared on the Order Paper that I thought we had done nothing about preparing ourselves for this new human being coming into our lives and how we would care for him and look after him if, in the unfortunate situation described by some hon. Members, he required emergency first aid.

One of the great benefits we got ahead of my wife giving birth was the care, understanding and education of our antenatal classes. They were excellent. At Dr Gray’s and throughout Moray we have excellent midwives. We went along to Moray College on two Thursdays to attend the classes, which really prepared us both, giving us all the knowledge and information we needed for the birth and the first few days. I now wonder why we do not introduce an element of first aid training into those antenatal classes. There is a captive audience of parents wanting to know more about the first stages in their child’s life and the birth process, and they could be told how to provide emergency treatment for an infant if they require it once they are home.

[Emma Little Pengelly]

I endorse what the hon. Gentleman and my hon. Friend the Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) have said about using antenatal classes. The parents are there and they want to learn, so that is a good opportunity. Does he agree that there are alternative opportunities, such as through Sure Start, to target families to support them on looking after their child? There is that opportunity after the child’s birth to give parents those necessary skills to save lives.

[Douglas Ross]

I fully endorse what the hon. Lady said. If there is not time or there are other constraints that mean a first aid element cannot be included in an antenatal class, perhaps there should be a signpost saying, “This is something you can consider. Here are some of the organisations who could do this,” just to put it on people’s radar. They are very excited about the birth of their child and fascinated by the birth process, which they have gone along to learn about, so just mentioning that may be a trigger that would make some parents consider, “Actually it is important to go to that organisation, or another, to get that training.”