Hospitals: Coronavirus

(asked on 25th November 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that measures to limit the transmission of covid-19 in hospitals does not lead to the separation of mothers and babies.


Answered by
Nadine Dorries Portrait
Nadine Dorries
This question was answered on 3rd December 2020

Measures to limit the transmission of COVID-19 in hospitals should not lead to unnecessary separation of mother and babies.

The Department expects clinicians to provide care in keeping with clinical guidelines. Guidance on COVID-19 infection in pregnancy published by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Royal College of Midwives states that women and their healthy babies should be kept together in the immediate postpartum period if they do not otherwise require maternal critical care or neonatal care. Women with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 should be supported to remain together with their baby and to practice skin-to-skin/kangaroo care, if the newborn does not require additional medical care.

Guidance produced by the British Association of Perinatal Medicine sets out that a mother and her newborn should have unrestricted contact when admission to a neonatal unit is unavoidable.

Reticulating Splines