Infant First Aid Training for Parents

Sarah Newton Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd April 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Although the title of this afternoon’s debate is “Infant First Aid Training for Parents”, there is some debate about whether it should not be “parental first aid training for infants.” No doubt, all will be revealed. I call Sarah Newton.

[Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered infant first aid training for parents.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. You make a good point—I was never an excellent scholar, and I am sure my English can be improved upon. In the course of the debate, I hope to provide a good explanation of what I was seeking to achieve in securing it.

I would like to begin with Rowena’s story. Rowena had been shopping in a department store with her mother and her five-month-old daughter. They had stopped for coffee in the children’s section, where there were lots of mothers with their babies. Seated near their table was a mother feeding her nine-month-old baby girl some home-made food. Given that they both had little baby girls, they exchanged compliments on the girls and continued with their business.

Leaving her daughter with her mother, Rowena went off to buy some coffees. While in the queue, she heard screaming and a terrible commotion. Looking around, she realised it involved the mother she had just met. Rowena could see that something was wrong with the little girl, who was not moving and was very quiet. Instinctively, she left the queue and ran to the back of the café to see what she could do.

When Rowena arrived back at the table, she saw that two other customers had come to the mother’s aid. They were trying to calm the mother down while furiously patting the back of the baby girl. Rowena quickly realised that the baby was choking on the baby food that she had been fed. Fortunately, Rowena knew what to do. She told the women attempting to help to stop and that she had first aid training, and she took the baby. Because she had completed a baby first aid course, she felt confident enough to help.

Rowena sat on a chair and held the baby face down along the length of her left leg, with the head lower than the knee. She started to give her back blows, hitting her firmly between the shoulder blades. After Rowena delivered the second or third back blow, the baby girl started to cry, so Rowena realised that she could breathe and that the blockage in her throat had gone. She handed the girl to her mum and reassured both of them that everything was okay.

The mother was quite shocked and upset, and so was Rowena. She realised the significance of her intervention. She said:

“I didn’t fully realise until that point what had just happened and the gravity of it”.

She said it had a big impact on her. That day, Rowena had done something remarkable, yet so very simple. With a few simple actions, she had saved that baby’s life. I want to enable every new parent or carer to receive high-quality training.

[Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)]

I commend my hon. Friend on bringing this debate to the Chamber. I had first aid training with the Red Cross over a decade ago, as did my father. My dad put it to use when my mum had a mini-stroke, and my mum ended up using it on my dad when he was dying. I am a mother of a two-year-old little boy, Clifford. I am sure most parents would agree that the most precious thing in any parent’s life is their children. My hon. Friend has prompted me to go and be retrained, especially now that I have my little one. If we can, cross-party, encourage as many parents as possible to do that, that will be a win-win for us and for parents across the country.

[Sarah Newton]

I very much welcome my hon. Friend’s intervention as a young mum. Rowena had her first aid training through the Red Cross, which can provide my hon. Friend with specialist training for babies and children. Administering first aid to a young child is quite different from administering it to an older person. I commend my hon. Friend, and I hope that, as a result of our work today, many more parents will do the same.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

This is an excellent debate. The scale of the task we face is quite enormous. A survey published in The Daily Telegraph not so long ago showed that only 24% of parents thought they had the skills to be able to stop their child choking. That is a very small percentage. What can we do to encourage a vast number of parents to get the training?

[Sarah Newton]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. I am blessed to say that I have three children, who are in their twenties; I remember how many times I was worried about them and went to my GP or to A&E unnecessarily. I wish I had done the training, because I would have felt much more confident as a parent—I certainly would have saved some valuable time in A&E and with doctors.

I was prompted to secure this debate to continue the work I have done to prevent avoidable deaths from sepsis. We have made huge progress, and the Government have done excellent work with the UK Sepsis Trust to make sure that parents are aware of the symptoms of sepsis, as are our healthcare professionals, from paramedics right the way through to people in hospitals, and professionals in nursery schools and primary schools. They are all having sepsis training. That is important, and now is the time to build on that and to empower parents to spot the signs of not only sepsis but all other serious illnesses.

[Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this important debate and for sharing Rowena’s story. We all know that story could have turned out very differently. My constituents Joanne and Dan Thompson set up Millie’s Trust after their daughter Millie tragically passed away in a choking incident in October 2012. The trust provides paediatric courses for nurseries, emergency first aid courses for workplaces and first aid courses for families, including for young children between the ages of eight and 16—that may answer your earlier question, Mr Hollobone. Does my hon. Friend join me in recognising the wonderful work of Millie’s Trust and charities like it, which offer courses not only to give confidence and reassurance to professionals and parents, but to ensure a good grounding in first aid, potentially giving life-saving information to people in situations such as Rowena’s?

[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.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Lady for bringing this subject forward for consideration, and I commend her for the work she did as a Minister. I am very pleased to see her active on the Back Benches with the rest of us. I became a grandfather for the third time just before Christmas, when my grandson Austin—I already had two granddaughters—was born. I am very mindful that parents are immensely stressed after the birth of their baby, given the care babies require. For each parent to have just a bit of knowledge about these things at that time can be the difference between life and death. Does the hon. Lady agree that there is an opportunity, through the antenatal classes that mothers do with their local trust and GP, to instil in parents the basic skills she refers to?

[Sarah Newton]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution. I will come on to what I would like the Government to consider doing. I do not think we should be prescriptive about how this training is enabled. Lots of organisations provide such training—Kernow Resus is one such organisation, but we have also heard about the Red Cross, St John Ambulance and Millie’s Trust—and of course there is the NHS workforce themselves: maternity nurses, and healthcare professionals who visit families at home. We should not be at all prescriptive about how we might enable this training, but it is important that all parents have the opportunity to participate.

Most courses cost around £30, which will seem to most of us like a very modest investment, but not every parent will be able to afford that. That will be a real barrier for some families. That is why I would like the Government to enable universal access to high-quality, evidence-based training delivered by fully qualified providers. That would give us the opportunity to reduce morbidity and mortality and, importantly, family distress. It would also help tackle the associated costs of treatment, hospital admissions and even possible litigation. We have seen huge improvements in child and infant health in our country. The number of deaths of babies and small children has fallen significantly, but it is still far too high, so I really hope that the Minister will consider seriously how we might take forward this relatively modest, straightforward intervention.

The NHS is rightly focused on preventing ill health and injury, and I am delighted that the Government are investing so much in it. I am sure everybody in the Chamber is fully supportive of that investment. It would require only modest investment to pilot this training in a couple of geographical areas and work with a couple of local commissioning groups to see how they might go about delivering it. We have heard about a range of options they might pursue. By giving commissioning groups responsibility to see how they might go about that, we could collect proper evidence about not only the impact on families and the reduction of deaths and harm to children, but the impact on acute trusts and primary care in an area if, as a result of being more confident, parents do not engage with the NHS quite so much.

This would be a small but vital step. It would be such a positive contribution. We would have more Rowenas, and far fewer families would have to cope with the dreadful grief of losing a loved one.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Newton]

I hope, now that we are at the end of the debate, that the words on the Order Paper are beginning to make a bit more sense. It has been a fantastic debate, and I am grateful to the many Members who have come along today, particularly as there has been so much about Brexit in the main Chamber. That people have chosen to spend time here this afternoon underlines how important this issue really is.

It was great to hear from the parents in the room, including my hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Outwood (Andrea Jenkyns), and my hon. Friend the Member for Moray (Douglas Ross) and the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden), who I congratulate on becoming new fathers and on being prepared to speak so personally and eloquently about their journey as parents. If as a result of this debate we have done nothing more than to make sure than they sign up to courses and tell all their friends who are also young parents to go out and do those courses, we will have achieved something.

I also thank the hon. Member for Burnley (Julie Cooper) for reminding us of the important contribution of grandparents. More than ever, grandparents care directly for babies and children, so it is important that they are also trained and feel confident, because things change over time. It is good to hear a grandparent’s point of view.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) rightly reminded us, we are all champions in this place, whatever our personal experience. Whether we are like my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson), who brings huge professional expertise, or we are unqualified but passionate advocates for our communities, we have a very important role. I am sure that the my hon. Friend the Member for Henley will join my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) and the hon. Members for Belfast South (Emma Little Pengelly) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon) in leading campaigns in their constituencies to raise awareness of the courses and training that are available, so that more parents feel confident and able to identify the signs of serious illness or injury and to take appropriate action.

I am grateful to the Minister, whom I thoroughly enjoyed working with; I miss working with her. I will certainly take up her kind offer to follow up on the debate. I was particularly interested in her point about the NHS long-term plan and the important future for health visitors. I agree: when I was a new mum, the health visitor arriving each day was a really valuable service. That support from the health visitor was essential in starting me off on my parenting journey. I understand that the Minister is personally committed to developing that workforce, not only in numbers but in their range of skills, and that she is looking at what further roles they may play in providing this important training to new parents. Her suggestion that we work on that is really positive.

I will certainly take up the opportunity to evaluate the first aid courses that are available in my community in Cornwall and the impact that they are having not only on families, but on our local NHS. My hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham warns me that the forms can be very long and that it can be an arduous process, but we will certainly give it a go. I look forward to working with my hon. Friend the Minister to do what all of us in this room want: to make sure that parents of any age get the best possible support in starting that amazing journey of being parents, so that all their children grow up to be healthy and happy, and we avoid all preventable deaths and injuries.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered infant first aid training for parents.