Baby Loss: Covid-19

Sarah Owen Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Owen (Luton North) (Lab)]

I thank and pay tribute to the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory) for securing this important debate, and also for speaking with such bravery and honesty. It is a real inspiration—she has done Lily proud.

Coronavirus has impacted every part of our lives, often in ways that we did not think or expect. We took things for granted little things, such as holding the hands of loved ones who are in pain or upset, or even those across the political divide. When restrictions were put in place in hospitals for visitors, fathers, partners and support networks in relation to scans for expectant mums, I was not surprised to receive pleas from women in Luton who were saying that they really needed somebody there to support them through their scans and neonatal appointments.

That is especially important to people who have had difficult pregnancies or miscarriages or who have suffered baby loss in the past. Not every scan is one of joy, and the time before a scan can be an incredibly anxious, nervous one, full of dread. Holding someone’s hand during that time is incredibly important. That is why I am so pleased to say that, having worked closely on this issue, the fantastic team at Luton and Dunstable University Hospital was one of the first to enact the new guidance allowing visitors to come to scans with expectant mothers.

As we know, with coronavirus everything is always under review. I really hope that the Government continue to support trusts in enabling that to happen as long as is humanly possible, because it is important. It is not like the films on TV when someone sees two pink lines and then suddenly the film fast-forwards to the very large woman buying lots of baby clothes and then screaming for a couple of minutes, and out pops the baby. For many people, that is not the reality of pregnancy. It is not that simple. Miscarriage and baby loss are part of the pregnancy journey that are often just not talked about. Yet, a quarter of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. If we are to end the stigma, the silence and sometimes the shame, we need to be open and honest.

The first time I miscarried, I was at work. I knew that something was not right, so I booked myself a scan during lunch break. I was by myself then, and they told me that there was no heartbeat. To be honest, what happened next was a bit of a blur, but I still remember the emotional and physical pain as if it was yesterday. I will be perfectly honest: a miscarriage is not like a period. It is incredibly physically and emotionally painful. The second time, we were further along. I was not alone for that scan. It did not make the news any easier, but I cannot describe the difference it made to have my hand held, gently squeezing support to one another.

During these losses, and throughout the pregnancy of my wonderful rainbow baby—the term for a baby born after miscarriage or baby loss—my friends and family were there every step of the way, and held me close to get me through those dark times. But my fear is for all those women who no longer have that support. That is exactly why I urge the Government to hold out for as long as they can to ensure that visitors can come to the scans of expectant mums, and to tackle the cause of the doubling of stillbirths during this lockdown.

I want to pay tribute to the Miscarriage Association. Without its support, I know that myself and thousands of women would still have struggled, and struggled alone. Social media is often a cesspit; but I have to say, for any woman who has miscarried, or is pregnant following miscarriages or baby loss, the Miscarriage Association’s website and forums on Facebook are an oasis of comfort, information and understanding. During this time, I know that we cannot hold the hands of everyone we want to. There are women out there, associations, charities and hospitals doing their best to get us through, and I hope the Government listen to their concerns and work with them so that no woman endures baby loss alone and so that women are no longer an afterthought throughout this pandemic.

[Siobhain McDonagh (in the Chair)]

I have been here 23 years and I have never seen a Doorkeeper distributing tissues to Members during a debate—I thank him. I am sure this is going to be a harrowing debate. There is a limit of about seven and a half minutes on speeches so that everybody can tell us their story.

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[Olivia Blake (Sheffield, Hallam) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McDonagh. I would just like to say a huge thank you to the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory) and to every Member who has spoken about their experience today. It is really important that we are having this debate on the effect of covid on services.

This debate is very difficult for me. I had not planned to talk about my experience today, because the experience of many of my constituents and the stories from up and down the country show that lessons desperately need to be learned and more support is needed for how we care for people through the covid crisis. However, after hearing the contributions from other hon. Members, I feel that it is only fair that I share my story.

My thoughts go out to all those families who are facing bereavement and baby loss and miscarriage at this time. I want to focus, particularly, on partners being able to attend appointments, emergency and otherwise, and on mental health and redeployment of key staff. We need to recognise that this is not just a short-term challenge and we could be seeing many more months of disruption as a result of covid-19.

As we know, as many as one in four pregnancies will end in miscarriage and 14 stillbirths happen every day. I first raised the issues of maternity services back in June, because I heard concerns from my constituents about them. Little did I know that I would experience a miscarriage in August and would have to go through some of the issues that my constituents had raised with me—going to A&E and my partner having to wait in the car park; getting confused and muddled about my dates; being unable to have a hug or someone to hold my hand or support me on hearing the news that I was having a miscarriage.

It was a very difficult situation and one that I want no one else to have to go through. No one should have to hear that news on their own.

[Sarah Owen]

We would all like to express our thanks to my hon. Friend for her bravery in sharing her personal experience, especially as it is so recent and clearly so raw, and also because it is an experience that her constituents have written about. You are doing a fantastic job representing them here today.

[Olivia Blake]

Thank you. I can’t see because my glasses have steamed up because of my tears.

Receiving bad news alone is incredibly traumatic and challenging. Having to then go and repeat that news to your partner in a car park is another level of difficult, at a point when you are struggling to process the information. It is impossible to take in everything that has been raised or to answer any of your partner’s questions when you get into the car. No one should be put in that position, but too many people have been.

While I welcome the Government’s change of advice and guidance on allowing partners to attend scans and appointments, it is currently not enough to improve access. I urge the Minister to do more and not assume that the job is done on this issue. Unfortunately, when I talk to my local services about my own experience and that of others, they say that they are still unable to operate in a way that is safe to allow partners. I know partners have been forced to wait outside, not knowing what is happening on the other side of those walls, unable to attend and support their loved ones, including those who have already experienced the loss of a baby. They have been unable to discuss options and many have been left alone for long periods after receiving devastating news, as staff are unable to comfort them, other than to offer a tissue.

My constituent has started a petition campaigning for access to neonatal and specialist units, to ensure that all parents with a baby are able to visit their child if they are receiving extra care. It is clear that that depends on postcodes. Simple steps, such as testing both parents to allow them to visit when their child has to stay in hospital and receive treatment, could easily fix that situation. I call for more medium-term answers to be provided, and an increase in investment and space for more covid-secure provision, whether on a regional footprint or in the community within every trust. It should not be down to postcode. Everyone going through this should have the right to be treated with compassion and dignity.

That compassion should extend to providing even more support, in terms of bereavement counselling, at this time. The support that parents or siblings would usually provide is also very difficult. I have not been able to hug my mum since August and it is very hard. We know that space for memory making has also been squeezed. I urge that such spaces be protected, as they are key to the grieving and healing process.

I want to focus on the redeployment of staff in these areas. I pay tribute to all the NHS and local authority staff who are working incredibly hard, under extremely difficult circumstances. However, I question the decision to redeploy health visitors and midwives, who play a key role in helping to detect issues. The redeployment of such staff does not accept the reality that pregnancy, and complications in pregnancy, will continue. They are not elective services and will not stop during a pandemic.

We have seen caseloads massively jump up, in some cases to hundreds more than usual, as staff are left in services and are unable to give their normal professional standards and time to each family. Harrowing reports were covered by BBC Radio 4’s “Woman’s Hour” earlier in the year on the experience of mothers and the workforce. That was one of the biggest issues raised. I hope the Minister will ensure that the situation is not repeated in the current spike or future spikes, and will be able to make the case to the Department that these are vital key services, for which there is no pause or stop button.

Finally, I hope we can all agree that this issue needs more action, and that support for our constituents must be prioritised. We cannot face going back to a situation with partners waiting in car parks and we need to fix the postcode lottery on that.

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[The Minister for Patient Safety, Mental Health and Suicide Prevention (Ms Nadine Dorries)]

I definitely will. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Eagle. I thank the hon. Member for Tooting (Dr Allin- Khan) for doing the round-up and highlighting everybody’s speeches. I thank all hon. Members for being here today, and I particularly thank my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory) for securing this debate. Her speech was a difficult and incredibly brave thing to do.

Normally this debate would be in the main Chamber—I responded to it last year—and were it not for the social distancing in this Chamber, other colleagues would have been here today giving their support, and telling their own difficult stories or sharing their experiences, which is so important in raising the issue. Let us hope that next year the debate will be in the main Chamber. I am disappointed that the debate taking place in the Chamber right now is not taking place here and that we are not in the Chamber. It has almost downplayed the importance of this subject. I want to put it on the record that this debate deserves its place in the main Chamber next year.

I want to pick up on a few of the important points that have been made before I get to the substance of explaining what the NHS is doing. The hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) raised the issue of the increased number of stillbirths from 24 to 40, and I want to use that to piggyback on the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Angela Richardson). This is a new virus. We do not know its full pathology or impact or what we will learn going forward, but the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran is absolutely right that the number of stillbirths has gone up. The Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch has launched a thematic review into the reasons behind the change, and we hope it will report within the next few months. We want to unpack that—was it to do with the virus, or was it to do with circumstances?—and to know fully what those details were. She was quite right that the numbers have gone up, but we need to know why. It may not be the virus at all, but we absolutely have to know what it was, and that work is already under way. I just wanted to reassure colleagues on that.

I am delighted that a regular at these debates has just joined the Public Gallery—my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) has been instrumental in the APPG and in bringing forward this debate on a yearly basis. I am delighted that she has joined us, because it would not be quite the same if she was not here, and I thank her for that.

Before I move on to the substance, I will pick up the point raised by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake). I thank her for sharing her story, because it was so raw and so new, and her experience was—there is no other way to put it—a dreadful one. However, as the Minister, I have to tread the line of balance, and I would like to say that, yes, on 8 September, along with the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, we agreed new guidance that would be sent out to trusts to allow, where possible, partners—and not just partners, but parents or friends—to go in for scans with sonographers and to be there for the mother, so that she has somebody with her to support her throughout all those appointments. Trusts that can do that are doing it wherever possible.

Of course, the answer is the testing, and a lateral flow test will be available for anybody who wants one in Liverpool from tomorrow. That is the key to the future. Those tests give the results in 15 minutes, so they are a bit like a pregnancy test, and the specificity is, I think, 99.9%, so we can be sure and confident in maternity units that parents and partners can go in and that it is a covid-secure place.

As we know, and as the hon. Member for Tooting can inform us all, when young babies are born, their immune systems are very compromised—almost non-existent, and there has been a balance in ensuring that the environments in maternity units are covid-safe. I just give one example of a birthing mother who had two partners accompany her for the birth, both of whom had tested positive for coronavirus within the previous few days.

There is that balance for the NHS staff and midwives as well, because NHS staff have gone down with covid themselves, and we need to keep our midwife workforce working as healthily as possible. Each trust, in conjunction with NHS staff, decides how to apply the guidance and how to make its areas safe and secure for pregnant mothers to go to.

I also mention the case of one sonographer, who does the scans, who told me that her room has no windows because of the glare on the screen. It is 6 feet by 4 feet, and it has a table, the ultrasound equipment, and room for one chair and the bed. There is no ventilation whatever; it is almost an extended cupboard on the inside of the hospital. There is no way that that room could be covid-secure for her for the amount of time it takes to do a scan. Again, we need to keep our sonographers working.

There is a balance. I know that some trusts have changed where the scans are done and that the NHS is trying its very best to ensure that situations such as the one the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam went through —it was just dreadful, and it was so brave of her to recount it so soon—are minimised as far as possible, but having the lateral flow test is the key, so that we know that people going in and out of the hospital are negative for coronavirus. That is the key to the future and to ending this particularly difficult problem.

I thank the charity Sands and the Baby Loss Awareness Alliance for making Baby Loss Awareness Week a success once again. This year, it focused on the feelings of isolation that many women, fathers, partners and other family and friends experience after pregnancy and baby loss. Those feelings of isolation have sadly been amplified by the covid-19 pandemic and the measures that have had to be put in place to keep healthcare workers, patients and the general public safe.

To mark the week, I met with the charities Sands, Bliss and Tommy’s, and hosted the first meeting of my new maternity inequalities oversight forum, a small group of clinical and academic experts and service users that will regularly discuss women and babies from black, Asian and other minority and ethnic backgrounds and those from lower socioeconomic communities. Every stillbirth or baby loss is a tragedy, and it is only right that we support, and remain absolutely committed to supporting, parents through any difficult situations that they may experience at that difficult time.

The reason I established the inequalities oversight forum is that women from black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds suffer inequalities during birth. We need to find out the reasons why. We need to find out why black women are five times more likely to have a stillbirth or to die during childbirth. We need to get to the bottom of the reasons and to find out what we can put in place to ensure that, by addressing those issues, we reduce the number of stillbirths.

I was deeply affected by the heartbreaking photographs shared by Chrissy Teigen last month when she lost her son Jack around halfway through her pregnancy. It was incredibly brave, moving the debate out into the public arena again. Closer to home, one of our colleagues and friends, my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman), tragically lost his twin boys, Rafe and Teddy, shortly after they were born. I commend the bravery and strength of all those individuals who have come forward, as everyone in the Chamber has today, to open up the conversation about baby loss. For far too long it has carried a stigma, as we have heard, and has been treated as a taboo subject.

I would like to mention the death of Mary Agyapong, a pregnant nurse who died with covid after her baby was delivered at Luton and Dunstable University Hospital, where she worked. That deeply affected me, as the hospital serves my constituents. It is a tragic case, and our deepest sympathies remain with Mary Agyapong’s family.

It is one of the Government’s highest priorities to reduce the number of stillbirths and other adverse maternity outcomes, and to make sure that grieving families and friends have access to the support that they need.

[Sarah Owen]

On the point about the loss of Mary Agyapong, I would like to share my sadness, as she was a constituent of mine. I hope the Government will continue to support her family throughout this difficult period. As to the point about black, Asian and minority ethnic women suffering more stillbirths and miscarriages throughout pregnancy, that has been heightened throughout covid. What is being done to look into the situation, and how can this be improved for the future?