Baby Loss and Safe Staffing in Maternity Care

Roger Gale Excerpts

Tuesday 25th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Jill Mortimer]

I agree that local maternity services— I have the Rowan suite in Hartlepool—are invaluable, because the midwives know their community. They know the women—they are often friends with the mother or an aunt—and that gives them the feeling that people are listening all the time. It is also important that we get midwives trained in bereavement care. I wonder how that kind of care and intervention may have impacted my experience and helped me to cope with emotions of guilt and loss while still allowing myself to feel joy for the life that I had brought into the world in my daughter.

Sadly, experiences 25 years on from mine have not got any better. I am proud to be here today to speak on behalf of my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory)—my friend and colleague—who, as co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on baby loss, has told us all of her own recent terrible experience of baby loss. We have just had the publication of the Kent report, which details 200 incidents at hospitals in Margate and Ashford. Baby loss still happens all too often. We simply need more midwives so that they can feel confident that they are providing the very best care they can to all mothers. As noted in the Ockenden report, it is not just about safer staffing levels: it is about quality care. We need more trained bereavement specialist midwives.

[Sir Roger Gale (North Thanet) (Con)]

I had not intended to intervene, because I have to leave the debate, but my hon. Friend mentioned the Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Hospital; as the constituency MP, may I place on the record my concern, and the fact that we are pursuing with vigour—and I mean with vigour—every angle to ensure that what happened there never happens again?

[Jill Mortimer]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention. I am reassured that everybody involved in that case is working hard to put things right.

I am regularly in contact with the wonderful staff at the Rowan suite in Hartlepool. They, too, advocate for the importance of bereavement care for grieving parents. The reality is that bereavement specialists have on average just two hours of working time to dedicate to each baby death. That is simply not enough. I have heard from bereavement midwives who are left having to choose which parents they go to. There are simply not enough of those midwives to go round. Parents who were so full of hope hours earlier are left alone, suffering the rollercoaster of grief that fills the inevitable void from losing a pregnancy or a baby. Expert, kind and understanding support is vital at that terrible time.

I have also met representatives of Sands, one of the many great charities that work in this important area. They have told me that cases of stillbirth in England and Wales rose in 2021 for the first time in seven years. That reflects the experiences of mothers who contacted Mumsnet to say that during covid most of their maternity appointments were cancelled. Mumsnet contacted me to share those mothers’ stories. One mother said that her previous history and notes were ignored and that a previous condition she had suffered from escalated and caused unnecessary complications. She felt that was due to bad organisation, shortages, funding cuts and bad management during covid, which left the delivery unit at her local hospital dangerously understaffed on the night her daughter was born.

I have three asks of my hon. Friend the Minister. Covid is largely behind us, but maternity staff are still exhausted from that time, and 13 babies are stillborn or die shortly after birth every day. Will the Minister please tell us what steps the Government are taking to ensure the 2025 ambition announced by the Health Secretary in 2017 to halve stillbirth and neonatal death rates?

The joint meetings of the APPGs on maternity and baby loss have listened to evidence and stories from multiple women and agencies, and we have commissioned a report with Sands and the Royal College of Midwives. We want to ask the Minister whether she will commit to increasing investment in maternity services and fulfilling the shortfall of 2,000 midwives and 500 consultant gynaecologists and obstetricians. We need more and, sadly, it is becoming harder to retain staff because they are burnt out from the effects of staffing shortages. It is a vicious cycle.