Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department took to put in place precautionary measures to help protect (a) antenatal care, (b) maternity units and (c) post-natal care from the effects of the covid-19 outbreak during the covid-19 lockdown announced in (i) March 2020 and (ii) November 2020.

NHS England and NHS Improvement and its partners have published a range of guidance and public communication messages for pregnant women to help maternity services meet the challenge of the pandemic. In addition, 16,000 blood pressure monitors were procured for distribution free of charge to ensure blood pressure self-monitoring was available for all pregnancies with chronic hypertension, gestational hypertension or pre-eclampsia.

In March 2020, four healthcare professional regulators, including the Nursing and Midwifery Council, put in place emergency registers of former professionals in order to increase capacity during the pandemic. Emergency education standards were also introduced to enable students in the last six months of the final year of undergraduate midwifery degrees to be spent in supervised clinical placements.

These measures are continuing to help protect maternity services from the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak.