Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to reduce group B strep infections in newborn babies.

The United Kingdom uses the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ risk-based approach whereby those women identified as being at increased risk of having a baby affected by Group B streptococcus (GBS) are managed according to agreed clinical guidelines on the prevention of early on-set neonatal GBS infection.

To improve understanding, prevention, and treatment of GBS infection, the Department is supporting a trial, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research. It aims to determine whether routine testing for GBS for all women, either in late pregnancy or on admission for labour with point of care testing, reduces early-onset neonatal sepsis compared to the current approach of risk-based screening.

The UK National Screening Committee (NSC) will review its recommendation considering the evidence from the trial, after the report is presented.

The UK NSC previously reviewed the evidence to screen for GBS at 35 to 37 weeks of pregnancy in 2017 and concluded that there was insufficient evidence to demonstrate that the benefits of screening would outweigh the harms. This was because the test currently available cannot accurately distinguish between those mothers whose babies are at risk and those who are not. This means that many women would unnecessarily be offered antibiotics during labour, with the balance of harms and benefits from this approach being unknown.