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 parents do not have to wait six months or more for post-mortem results following the death of a baby.

The Government recognises the significant impact of delays in post-mortems on bereaved families. Specialised perinatal pathology services provide medical investigations, including post-mortem examinations following the death of a foetus or baby. These services are delivered by 18 National Health Service hospital trusts in England.

Perinatal pathology services are currently experiencing significant staff shortages. There are 26.15 whole time equivalent consultant vacancies, which is a 46% vacancy rate across the service. The lack of consultant staff is impacting the service’s ability to produce post-mortem reports in line with national standards, as set out in NHS England’s service specification B, which is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/e12-perinatal-path.pdf

In response to the impact that the staffing challenges are having have on the service, NHS England has established a Perinatal Pathology Transformation Programme which is implementing interventions to increase perinatal pathology service capacity over time and improve the post-mortem reporting time. The programme reports to a national Steering Group which has clinical, commissioning, and key stakeholder representation, including service users and patient and public voice representation, through the baby loss charity Sands. The Royal College of Pathologists is also included in the membership of the Steering Group.

Additionally, we welcome and are carefully considering the findings of the Justice Committee’s recent follow-up Inquiry into the Coroner Service, including on coronial pathology provision.