Last week I led the debate in Parliament on to mark Baby
Loss Awareness Week, which runs from 9 to 15 October.
As co-chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for
Baby Loss, along with former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt MP, I used my speech
to highlight the group’s aims for the future, as well as the work it has
already been doing in this area.
As someone who has experienced the awful reality of losing a
baby first hand, I am able to use my
experience to help make things better for other families who sadly go through
their own baby loss journeys every day.
For this year’s speech, I wanted to highlight and raise the
profile of issues around wellbeing. One key issue is maternity safety. Every
day in the UK around 14 babies die before, during or soon after birth. Although
progress has been made, we need to redouble efforts as the current rate of
reducing stillbirths means the 2025 target will be missed. To improve safety
and prevent avoidable baby deaths the Government must increase investment in
maternity services, tackle inequalities in perinatal outcomes, take action to
prevent erroneous charging of vulnerable women for NHS Maternity Care and
invest in reviews following the death of a baby.
Another key issue I wanted to highlight was that of
bereavement care and our push as an APPG to develop a National Bereavement Care
Pathway in England. The loss of a baby at any gestation is devastating for
parents. Poor bereavement care, from the moment of first diagnosis and breaking
of bad news, only exacerbates the profound pain felt by parents, and whilst
approaches to bereavement care in the UK have greatly improved in recent years,
inconsistency still remains, resulting in a postcode lottery for parents.
As of last month, all NHS Trusts in England have either
expressed interest or formally committed to implementing the National
Bereavement Care Pathway within their hospitals and services.
This is good progress, but if the Government made the
pathway and its nine standards mandatory this would speed up implementation
across all areas and lead to greater time, funding and resources being
available to healthcare professionals to deliver them. Trusts require
additional funding to fully implement all the standards within the NBCP,
especially to ensure that every hospital has an appropriate bereavement suite,
specialist staff and training.
Finally, I wanted to touch on mental health care. Grief is a
natural response to this particularly isolating bereavement. Some people carry
this with them for the rest of their lives but do not develop a mental health
problem. However, many bereaved parents will go on to experience psychiatric
illnesses such as PTSD that require specialist support, triggered by intense
grief and the trauma of their experience.
In 2019 The Baby Loss Awareness Week Alliance’s report Out
of Sight, Out of Mind found that 60% of bereaved parents were not able to
access the psychological help they needed. Since then, it has been announced
that new Maternal Mental Health Hubs in England will support mothers who have
lost a baby which is very welcome.
However, we also know that fathers and partners need
support, in a Sands survey 62% of men reported feeling suicidal following their
experience of pregnancy or baby loss. I will be using my speech to highlight
the action needed to ensure partners get the mental health support they need.
During debate I was grateful to colleagues across Parliament
for their support – these are difficult conversations to have, but it is by
working together to highlight these tragic issues, that we will be able to
improve the experience for families in the future who go through them.
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