Stillbirth

Will Quince Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

I echo the comments about the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) and congratulate her on securing this very important debate. She is incredibly brave to talk about her experience—I know that from my personal experience of doing the same thing. I also pay tribute to her colleagues who have come to support her, because that is hugely comforting. What she has done is incredibly brave, and I thank her very much for that.

The hon. Lady spoke about the importance of talking about stillbirth and neonatal death. She hit the nail on the head: we do not like talking about death in this country—even more, we do not like talking about the death of children and, in particular, babies—but it is only by talking about not just stillbirth but neonatal death and the death of babies that we can understand the scale of the issue. As she rightly said, a lot of people in this country do not understand how poor we are at tackling this issue. We are somewhere in the region of 23rd in the western world. Given that we have one of the best health services in the world, that is totally unacceptable.

I do not particularly like talking about statistics when it comes to babies. The hon. Lady rightly said that somewhere in the region of 3,500 babies a year are stillborn. If half of those deaths are avoidable, that is approximately 1,500 to 2,000 babies and 2,000 to 4,000 parents who would not have had to go through this experience. It is not just the parents who feel the effects of stillbirth and neonatal death, but the grandparents, the friends and the wider family.

I will talk about my own experience very briefly. I have three beautiful children, but only two of them are currently with us. We lost our son. He was diagnosed at 22 weeks with a very rare chromosomal disorder called Edwards syndrome, which meant that there was a relatively high likelihood that he would not make it. As was said earlier, it meant living every day with the prospect of a stillbirth—it was too late for a miscarriage at that stage. He went full term—he was a fighter—so we went through the experience of stillbirth at full term. I have said in the Chamber previously that there is no word to describe the experience other than numbness—in fact, I will not describe it because it is going to make me upset. The point I want to make is that every single stillbirth is an absolute personal tragedy. We as a Government and as politicians have a duty to do all we can to ensure that as few people as possible go through that personal experience.

That happened in 2014. On entering this place, I was committed to doing something about this issue. I teamed up with a number of other MPs and we set up an all-party parliamentary group on baby loss, which the hon. Lady kindly joined, to do something about this on a cross-party basis. The Government have the responsibility and the power to do a lot of the work, but the all-party group can act as a conduit between the fantastic charities that work in the sector and the Government, who I know are committed to tackling the issue.

My hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) made an important point about mums and dads. We thought it very important that I co-chair the APPG; it is intentional that we have a man and a woman co-chairing the group. It is important that we address the issue from both sides, because it affects men as much as it affects women.

As the hon. Lady said, Baby Loss Awareness Week is coming up in October. In Parliament, we will be marking that occasion for the very first time. Mr Speaker has kindly allowed us the use of his state rooms for a function. We will be sending around ribbons and encouraging as many right hon. and hon. Members as possible to wear them proudly, and to talk about and raise the issue as much as possible in that week and also throughout the year.

I spoke earlier about the amazing work of charities in this sector. I will name just two—Sands and Bliss—but there are so many more that do incredible work, from charities carrying out research to very small organisations that knit hats, mittens, scarves and all sorts of other things, which can be hugely comforting to parents who have gone through this experience.

The Government have a very important role to play in tackling this issue. As the hon. Lady said, research is a huge part of that, whether it is on social inequality—which, as she rightly said, is a known factor in stillbirth—maternal age or ethnicity. We still do not really understand why ethnicity is so important. There is another awkward subject that we do not like to talk about in this country: we do not encourage parents who have gone through this terrible experience to have post-mortems. Often, medical professionals do not want to ask the question, but if they phrase it correctly and say, “By offering your baby for a post-mortem, it would help us immensely in understanding, in research terms, why this happens,” it will help to prevent more in the future. We have to do far more to encourage post-mortems.

My hon. Friend the Member for Henley talked about education for parents-to-be, whether about drugs, smoking, diet or obesity—the two are somewhat different. There is a huge amount of work to do in that area.

The hon. Lady is absolutely right to suggest that this is not a party political issue—it crosses the divide—but I am hugely proud that the Government recognise that it is serious and have taken steps to address it. They are not just talking but putting money in, and they have set a target. Targets are thrown around all the time, but they are meaningless unless the money and resources are behind them, so I am proud that the Government have done that.

There are some important elements to the Government’s new care bundle. I fully agree with my hon. Friend that it is important that we ensure that clinical commissioning groups and hospital trusts are doing what the Government are mandating them to do. The smoking cessation work is really important. Still now, more than one in 10 mums smoke during pregnancy. We know that that is such a high-risk factor when it comes to stillbirth. On foetal growth monitoring, we are one of the few countries that do not scan in the late stages of pregnancy. We scan at about 20 weeks and then do not do anything until the mother goes into hospital, but lots of other countries scan at 36 weeks. We are also looking at foetal growth, which is really important. The bump is measured from naval to the pelvic bone, and if there are any issues with its size, the mother is sent to hospital for a scan with a consultant. That is very important. We need to do far more foetal growth scanning in the later stages of pregnancy.

The hon. Lady also made a hugely important point about the awareness of foetal movement and the importance of foetal monitoring. We absolutely have to empower more women when they get that feeling. In so many cases of stillbirth, the mums say with hindsight, “I knew there was something wrong, but I didn’t want to bother health professionals,” or, “I phoned my doctor or the NHS helpline, and they said don’t worry.” The reality is that, if there is an issue, mums often know. It is important to empower women, so that if they feel something is not right, they go and get it checked out. We would much rather they got a diagnosis to say, “There’s nothing wrong. You’re okay. Go home”, than they ignored it, but worried about it, only for horrendous consequences to ensue.

The new Government care bundle is important and good, with £4 million being put in. In my local hospital, Colchester general hospital, we have already seen the start of that money trickling down. New monitors have been installed, and they are going in all across the country, which will help with the monitoring element in the later stages of pregnancy. Another hugely important bit is the training of midwives and nurses, and more than £1 million has been put into that. Finally, a £500,000 investment has been made in the review process, to ensure that we document and learn from every single stillbirth, while treating each as a personal tragedy. Those records should be kept and shared, so that we can look at best practice across hospitals. Some of our hospitals in the United Kingdom are fantastic and world-class, but, sadly, some are not. We need to bring all hospitals and maternity units in the country up to the very best standard.

I am pushing the time limit, but I will touch briefly on two more points. Sadly, even if we meet the Government’s target on stillbirth, which is to reduce it by 15% by 2020 and half by 2030—an incredible aim, and I would love it if we got to that position—1,500 to 2,000 babies would be stillborn every single year, so it is still important to deal with some of the bereavement issues in hospitals across our country.

The first priority should be bereavement suites; it is imperative to get one attached to every maternity unit in the country, because it is totally unacceptable that any mum or dad, having gone through the experience of a stillbirth, should have to go on to a general maternity ward, surrounded by happy families with balloons and teddies and the sound of crying babies. That is not acceptable. The Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer), has absolutely recognised the issue, and is working hard on it; he is doing a study of exactly what provision we have in our hospitals. I would love it if, by the end of this Parliament, we could have a bereavement suite attached to every maternity unit in the country.

Finally, although the bereavement suite is one part of that jigsaw, the second part is having enough bereavement-trained midwives and gynaecological counsellors in those units who are able to give the support to parents, not only at the time, but afterwards and—as the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran said—with future pregnancies.

In conclusion, the hon. Lady is hugely brave. She raises a hugely important issue, and one that I know the Government recognise and are taking action to address. We, as cross-party politicians, can keep pressure on the Government to ensure that they meet that target of a 15% reduction by the end of the Parliament and—what an aim!—to halve stillbirth by 2030.