That this House has considered maternity services in Gloucestershire.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. The hon. Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) sends his apologies; he was due to be here but he is counting the votes somewhere else at the moment in an important internal election. He wanted me to start by saying that he gives his full support to the comments that I and others will make in support of maternity services in Gloucestershire, so I hope Hansard reflects that.
It is not controversial to say that NHS services across the country are struggling. One of the services that impacts all of us at least once in our lives is maternity care. This service is at the heart of women’s healthcare; it must be treated with the utmost seriousness. Pregnancy and childbirth is a special moment for families. It is a memory I cherish—obviously I was not pregnant myself. It is something to be cherished by all. But for pregnant women it can also be an extremely stressful experience. If there are failures in the system, the consequences can be dire.
Some of those consequences were laid bare in the recent “Panorama” documentary on maternity services in Gloucestershire. In that documentary we heard too many harrowing stories. Brave whistleblowers from within the system and brave mothers told their stories—one brave father told a story too. Those stories were told in the most heartbreaking terms, and will stick with me for as long as I live. Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS foundation trust apologised for those failings. It has invested in increased staffing, worked to reduce staff turnover and has made changes to leadership in maternity care. But so much more needs to be done.
The service at Gloucestershire Royal hospital was rated inadequate in 2022 and again in 2023. The findings of a further inspection earlier this year are still awaited, but a section 31 safety enforcement notice was served in May. Cheltenham’s midwife-led Aveta birth unit serves a large chunk of our county. It was closed for births in autumn 2022, some time before six of our county’s seven Members of Parliament were elected. The closure was due to a shortage of midwives. The reorganisation by the hospital’s trust was carried out to ensure that one-to-one care across Gloucestershire’s wider maternity services could be achieved. It is an entirely understandable response; nobody would want to put mothers and babies at risk.
We were told, however, that the measures were temporary. Two years down the line they are still in place, and that is not an acceptable situation for people in our county. The NHS hospital trust suggests that the Cheltenham Aveta centre will not re-open for births before April 2025. Even then, nothing seems certain. The trust states that it is committed to reopening the centre when it is safe to do so. However, the byzantine way in which the NHS sometimes works means that it is difficult to work out who will be the ultimate decision maker. Sometimes decisions on resources are made by the integrated care board rather than hospital trust staff, and that collaborative process makes it difficult to work out who must be held to account for statements that have been made in the past.
I commend the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. Everyone in this room will be very aware that the difficulties in Gloucestershire are unfortunately replicated in every part of the United Kingdom—certainly in my part of it. We have some of the best staff in the world in our maternity wards, and we rightly recognise the good work that they do, but they are being hampered in doing their job and caring by understaffing, budgetary restraints and an inability to get support from senior staff. I believe this needs a root-and-branch change across all the United Kingdom. Would the hon. Gentleman agree with that?
I would. The hon. Member makes a strong case, and I will come on to some of the evidence from the Royal College of Midwives later. It has done some important studies into the stress that midwives are put under in the system.
I will move on to Stroud—the hon. Member for Stroud (Dr Opher) is in his place. In Stroud, six post-natal beds were closed around the same time as the closure to new births at the Cheltenham Aveta centre. The reason given by the trust was that the temporary closure would consolidate staffing across the county and provide a safer level of care for births across the whole of Gloucestershire. I am certain the hon. Member will have more to say on this if he is called to speak later, and I am pleased to see him here.
In our county, the 6,000 families who rely on our maternity services each year view this as a significant downgrade in service, and it is a cause of worry for a large number of families. It is clear that these services can only reopen when staffing levels improve. At the moment, the trust says it is around 13% below the staffing level required to return to the previous level of service, with Cheltenham open and the beds reopened in Stroud. However, the nature of midwifery means that quite a lot of the midwives will be off on maternity leave themselves at any one time. Indeed, I will come on to talk about the stress that midwives are under and some of its causes, which have led to a larger proportion of midwives being off for a significant period of time each year than staff in the rest of the NHS.
Research into what is driving the recruitment and retention crisis exposes the scale of the challenge we face in Gloucestershire and across the rest of the country. We are told that recruiting to a trust under a section 31 safety notice is even more challenging than it is elsewhere. Midwives who are already under significant pressure are subjected to additional strains in the form of monitoring and bureaucracy, and that can have an impact on staff morale. Of course, monitoring and bureaucracy are important when we are trying to get trusts out of safety notices; however, we cannot look past the fact that that makes it more difficult to overcome those recruitment challenges.
As the Liberal Democrat spokesperson on mental health, I believe we should acknowledge and pay tribute to NHS staff in general and specifically midwives because we know that one factor that causes stress is overwork. We are also aware that the NHS very much runs on good will—people working extra hours and unpaid hours. That has been the norm for many years, but it is not sustainable. We need to acknowledge the support they need from a mental health point of view.
My hon. Friend makes a strong point. Employee assistance schemes have a strong role to play here. I understand that in the NHS there is quite good support in general. However, it is a massive struggle when people are working so many extra hours to ensure that they get the support they need. In the case of midwifery, it is a stressful job—a life-and-death matter in many circumstances.
There is a clear and obvious link between the extreme overwork identified in the RCN survey and the findings of the Care Quality Commission. Obviously, if staff are working so many extra hours, they will suffer. Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has identified staff turnover levels and low morale due to the workload as significant factors. The Darzi report also calls for a shift away from care in centralised hospital settings towards communities, and states that that is a likely route towards the recovery of our health services. That being the case, and with a Minister in the room, I say that there is a clear argument for restoring Cheltenham families’ access to a fully functioning birth unit in our town as soon as it is safe to do so.
I have three questions for the Minister, if she would be so kind as to answer them. First, what is the Government’s position on seeking to reinstate maternity services in places such as Cheltenham and Stroud, which have been recently downgraded? Secondly, what will the Government do to address the ongoing recruitment and retention crisis in midwifery? Thirdly, in cases such as Gloucestershire’s, where a section 31 notice is exacerbating recruitment and retention issues, what can the Government do to help local trusts improve their staffing position? I understand that there are examples of trusts around the country being supported to pay high wages and salaries to ensure that midwives can be properly recruited and to overcome shortages.
My local hospital, the Royal Berkshire hospital, is where my two children were born and many of our friends’ children were born. It has recently received an upgraded rating of good from the Care Quality Commission, and it is one of only nine organisations, out of 131, that got an upgrade to good over the last year, so I commend the Royal Berkshire leadership and staff for their diligence and dedication, and congratulate them on that result. Does my hon. Friend agree—
I am sure that I would agree with whatever my hon. Friend was about to say. He was making the point, I think, that it is easy to be down on our NHS and its staff. That is not the purpose of this debate at all; its purpose is to ensure that we give the support that is needed to our midwives, other NHS staff and, indeed, NHS managers, who are often maligned but, like other NHS staff, work long hours and are in it for the betterment of health services.
On a personal note, I offer my wholehearted thanks to the staff at Gloucestershire hospitals, who were there for my wife and me when our daughter was born in Gloucestershire Royal hospital in 2022. It was an important day for my family and for the country when we went into the operating theatre for the C-section: this country had no Prime Minister, and when we came out we had my daughter, Elodie, and we had Liz Truss. That is a memory that will live long for me. I particularly thank Fiona Liddle, the midwife who gave us the most care during my wife’s pregnancy, as well as all the doctors, nurses and healthcare workers who helped to make the experience so joyful for us.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I congratulate the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) on securing the debate and bringing attention to the challenges that our maternity services face in Gloucestershire. I must declare that as well as being an important subject for my constituents, this is a personal subject for me, and I am privileged to contribute my family’s experience to the debate today.
My little boy, who turns one later this month, was born in the county and spent his first night at Gloucestershire Royal hospital. While it is clear that there are challenges facing our maternity services and that improvements are required, I want to start by sharing the positives of our experience.
First, the support and care provided by the community midwifery team was second to none. Our midwife Lynsey was with us throughout our journey, and was even on call the day my wife went into labour, so she was there to deliver our little boy. Lynsey looked after us throughout my wife’s pregnancy, answering our questions and signposting us to courses that would enable us to become advocates for the birth we wanted. From the outset, our experience was positive, although I know that is not the case for all families, and it is essential that their voices are heard in this debate.
Being able to choose where you have your baby is important. Having conducted our own research, we decided that we wanted to give birth in a midwife-led unit. There are of course differing views on that, but that was our choice as we had read that midwife-led care can lead to fewer interventions. At the time in Gloucestershire, Stroud was the only reliable option, as Gloucester’s midwife-led suite was frequently closed due to a lack of available midwives. As part of our maternity care, we were invited to Stroud maternity unit to visit the birthing suite so that it was familiar on the big day. I understand that is very important, as stress produces hormones that can actually stop or slow down labour.
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. In 2021, my daughter was delivered by caesarean section following a complicated pregnancy. Thanks to the diligence of the delivery team, which included English, Indian, Italian, South African and Spanish experts, we were spared the trauma that too many parents endure, and took our daughter home 24 hours later. I cannot thank those professionals enough for their care and application of expertise. The midwifery profession and those who join it should be celebrated in this House, as they should across the country.
I would like to provide some national context to the issue of midwifery in Gloucestershire, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) did. Against significant budgetary constraints in the last decade, the NHS workforce has increased by 34%, while full-time midwife posts have risen by only 7%. In that same decade, caesarean section deliveries such as ours have increased by 10% to 23%, meaning that mothers and babies stay longer in hospital, and require additional care by midwives.
As my hon. Friend mentioned, a Royal College of Midwives survey in March 2024 recorded that nationally, midwives and maternity support workers carried out 120,000 hours of unpaid work in a single week. As my ex-colleagues across the Royal Air Force will confirm, when more is continually expected of a diminishing workforce, both the workload and the mental load will increase on those who remain until ultimately they leave or they break. Mistakes become more commonplace. Let us acknowledge the unique emotional load carried by our midwives, while they also carry the workload of 2,500 others due to our national shortage.
The inspection of Gloucestershire maternity services in April 2022 makes for concerning yet predictable reading. Like the hon. Member for Gloucester (Alex McIntyre), however, I am pleased to have received assurances from the chief executive of Gloucestershire hospitals NHS foundation trust that improvements have been and continue to be made. I look forward to a full debrief on the report that will follow the external investigation into Gloucestershire maternity care; the report must be transparent, and retrospective action must take place accordingly. That backdrop creates additional pressure for Gloucestershire maternity care as we look to attract newly qualified midwives to our beautiful county. My call to graduating midwives, as to those already in post, is, “Help us get this right and be a part of the success story.”
I thank the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) for calling this debate. Maternity care in the Stroud area has been a big issue for the past couple of years in particular. I have been a GP for 30 years, and I have helped with antenatal and post-natal care and, indeed, intrapartum care for six months, which was the hardest work I have ever done in my life. I also delivered my second daughter in a Worcester hospital.
I know and have worked with fabulous midwives, who are the absolute key to maternity services, as we have been discussing. Doctors are occasionally called in for other reasons, but midwives run maternity services; they have to be central, and they have to make their decisions around women. That is one of the reasons I promote Stroud maternity unit: as my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Alex McIntyre) said, midwife-based units have lower levels of intervention and better outcomes for babies.
As many hon. Members have said, the key problem here is the lack of midwives. We should not shy away from that, but I also want to talk about a number of other issues. Something that seems to have been missing from the discussion is women’s choice over where they give birth—we seem to have reduced that choice to just Gloucestershire Royal hospital. Although Stroud maternity unit is open for intrapartum care, it does not have post-natal beds, so women are generally choosing it less often. That is a pity, because it is a fantastic place to give birth and has a low intervention rate. Equity and equality also seem to have been lost from the discussion recently, and we need to get them back into the decision-making process.
Maternity care is actually a longer process than just where someone gives birth. I will outline where those interventions take place. Pre-conception and antenatal care tends to be done in GP surgeries by community midwives with the help of GPs. Intrapartum care can be done at home—a small proportion of people do give birth at home—or in midwife-led units, such as Stroud maternity, or in either midwife-led or consultant-led units, such as in Gloucester Royal and Cheltenham. They are the possibilities. When it comes to post-natal beds, the only choice at the moment is Gloucestershire Royal; there is no other option in Gloucestershire. Either mothers go there for their post-natal care or they have to go home and have a community midwife.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) for securing this debate.
Although my constituency is in south Gloucestershire—which I have spent many years as a unitary councillor explaining is a unitary authority, not a district of Gloucestershire—some of my constituents access health services north of the border in Gloucestershire. The serious concerns about maternity services in Gloucestershire are causing people to travel the other way across the border, into Bristol, where many other of my constituents use services, so they have a significant impact on my constituency.
I welcome this debate because I know from my own experience the impact that overstretched maternity services can have on outcomes for the mother and baby. I had the misfortune of giving birth in a hospital that had too many simultaneous emergencies. Even now, more than 20 years later, I vividly remember the feeling of abandonment, the horror when my newborn baby was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit, and the panic as I felt myself losing consciousness and a team of doctors rushed into the room to deal with me. It was many hours before I was reunited with my son, six months before he was discharged from consultant care, and more than two years before I was discharged. My experience of early motherhood was blighted by trauma, pain and seemingly endless follow-up appointments for both of us with a huge range of specialists. Five or more years later, doctors still considered my son’s birth relevant to his health. Sadly, for some families the outcomes are far, far worse. I cannot begin to imagine the pain of losing a child or partner in childbirth, but for some that is the tragic reality. How hard it must be to bear if there is the possibility that better care may have changed that reality.
Let us not forget the impact on the wider family. The hon. Member for Gloucester (Alex McIntyre) spoke about the support he received from staff when his son was born. The family, too, can be traumatised by what they see family members going through, so I understand how important it is to have good maternity services, and I am deeply concerned about the impact that the current shortage of midwives is having on outcomes for mothers, babies and their wider families. Stroud maternity unit is affected by the shortage, so people are choosing to travel to Southmead, which many of my constituents already use, and that extra pressure will make it harder for staff there to deliver the service that people need.
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If that were the only barrier, it would be somewhat simpler. The Royal College of Midwives conducted a randomised survey of weekly hours worked by midwives and maternity support workers. The findings were absolutely shocking. It found that the staff surveyed reported a collective total of nearly 120,000 unpaid hours that week. That is a stark illustration of the demands placed on frontline NHS staff, who go above and beyond in a system that appears to be falling apart at the seams.
It is no wonder that the Darzi review reports that there is a high rate of sickness absence among midwives at 21.5 days a year per midwife. The most common reasons cited for absence were anxiety, stress or depression, or other psychiatric illnesses. Midwives go into the profession because of a commitment to the health of women and babies and to giving care at a critical moment, and to be part of a joyful moment in so many families’ lives. The fact that they are collectively suffering such high levels of stress tells us just how badly wrong the system has gone.
Once my wife was in labour, however, our plans were nearly changed at the last minute due to a lack of midwives at Stroud maternity unit—stress we could have rather done without. That highlighted to me the great reliance currently placed on midwives working overtime to cover shifts across Gloucestershire. However, with Lynsey on hand and with minimal intervention, the birth itself was relatively quick and our baby boy was born. It was truly the best moment of my life.
Unfortunately, my wife needed an operation after the birth, so we were transferred to Gloucestershire Royal hospital: wife and baby in an ambulance, me following behind on what was, following the best moment of my life, the scariest car journey of my life. The care we received that night was exceptional. Not only were my wife and baby looked after, the unbelievably compassionate team looked after me too. Something as simple as a cup of tea and a reassuring chat when I had been up for 48 hours and left on my own with a newborn baby was transformative.
Unfortunately, things were not so positive the following morning. All was well with mum and baby, and we were told we would be going home in the afternoon. I went home to grab a quick shower, get some shopping in and make sure the house was ready for our new arrival. I was gone for at most two hours. When I got back, my wife told me she had been visited by over 10 different people in those two hours: pharmacy assistants, nurses and midwives, each adding new information about her discharge. She had just had a baby and undergone surgery under general anaesthetic. There were instructions for her and our baby. None of them were written down. For her, it was overwhelming, and something as simple as written discharge notes would have made a huge difference.
After we got home, our baby unfortunately developed some issues with his breathing. That can be quite normal, I understand, as babies are used to breathing fluid and getting oxygen via the umbilical cord. But as first-time parents who had been awake for 60 hours, we were worried, and there was no one to turn to. We phoned Stroud maternity unit, where we had given birth, but their post-natal unit is closed due to a lack of midwives, as the hon. Member for Cheltenham rightly pointed out. They advised us to call 111, and they told us we had to call Gloucestershire Royal’s delivery unit. They told us we had to call Stroud maternity unit because that is where we had given birth. We went back to Stroud, then back to 111, and no out-of-hours GP service was available. The only solution was to go to A&E.
Taking a newborn baby to A&E on a Saturday night is an interesting experience. The staff in A&E were wonderfully friendly, but their procedures limited what they could do. Our baby could not be seen by the neonatal unit as we had been discharged from the hospital. He would have to go to the paediatric unit, which the staff warned us was rife with covid. All we wanted was someone medically qualified to listen to his chest and let us know he was alright. There must be so many parents in a similar position, learning the art of being a parent for the first time and needing that little bit of assurance that their baby gasping for air is going to be okay. We need to find a better way for those parents to access that care.
Overall, I have to say a huge thank you to the team who looked after us from the early days of pregnancy right up until our son was born. How lucky were we to have our community midwife there at the birth—the person we had grown to know and trust? But in a way, that points to another problem: Lynsey is just one of many midwives across the county being pulled from the community to fill gaps in midwifery services.
Across Gloucestershire, vacancies and turnover rates in midwifery services remain high. The increased workload is causing low morale, and the workforce is struggling with the level and pace of change required for the service. Community midwives such as Lynsey regularly find themselves on call when too few midwives are available at midwife-led units in hospitals. Right now, there are vacancies for 32 midwives in Gloucestershire, which is 13% of the workforce. When we take into account sickness and maternity leave, that figure rises to 63 full-time equivalent vacancies. It is no wonder that midwives such as Lynsey are being asked to fill the gaps.
As the hon. Member for Cheltenham pointed out, the Royal College of Midwives estimates that across the UK, midwives give more than 100,000 hours of unpaid time to the NHS every week to ensure the safe running of services. While no one could doubt the dedication and compassion of those incredible midwives, that cannot be right. We cannot continue to rely on the commitment of midwives to their vocation to fill those gaps. If midwives are working more than 100,000 hours of unpaid overtime a week, it is inevitable that services will be affected, and that the safety of mothers and their babies will be put at risk. Midwives are being driven from the profession because the work and the pressure of work is just too much. It is no wonder my wife left hospital with no written discharge notes—where was the time left to write them?
While our experience of Gloucestershire Royal was largely positive, others have not been so fortunate. Many will have seen the harrowing instalment of “Panorama” that aired on the BBC in January this year, which focused on maternity services in Gloucestershire. The programme included the tragic deaths of the mother and two babies at the hospital between 2019 and 2021. Feedback from staff suggests that chronic staffing issues and a poor culture where midwives felt unable to speak out about unsafe conditions played a large role in what were avoidable deaths.
We also need to ensure that in a diverse city such as Gloucester, all residents—including those for whom English is a second language—can access the care they need. The recent CQC inspections of services in Gloucestershire have been very concerning, and Gloucestershire Royal hospital was issued with a section 31 enforcement notice by the CQC earlier this year. I raised this with the chief executive of the trust in my meeting with him in my first few weeks as the new MP for Gloucester. I understand that the trust has already made progress on its improvement plan, and I will keep a close eye on that on behalf of all Gloucester residents.
Earlier this year, the CQC published the national review of maternity services in England. It reviewed 141 units across the NHS and highlighted widespread issues with staffing, buildings, equipment and safety management processes. There are many deeply troubling takeaways from this report, but what stuck with me was the CQC’s stark warning that across our maternity services, preventable harm is at risk of becoming normalised. The last Conservative Government pushed our maternity services—our midwives—to the point where preventable harm could become a routine consequence of understaffing in units and on wards up and down the country. We cannot accept this for the future of maternity services in Gloucestershire or the UK.
I urge the Government to ensure that maternity services are given due attention when considering the Secretary of State’s 10-year plan for our NHS. Staff shortages are not the only issue we need to address, but it is clear that they are fundamental to the challenges our maternity services face in Gloucestershire and across the country. The Government have committed to training thousands of new midwives. We must honour that commitment to ensure that giving birth in the UK is safe, that parents have choice, and that midwives feel supported and valued for the incredible work they do.
The outcome of our efforts must be the permanent reopening of birthing units at Cheltenham and Stroud. Local efforts will take us only so far. Page 99 of Labour’s 2024 manifesto pledged to train “thousands more midwives”—a drive that will, I am sure, enjoy cross-party support. I invite the Minister to press the Chancellor to include a funded plan to train thousands more midwives in the autumn Budget.
The last part, I always think, of the whole maternity service is the eight-week check of the baby by their GP. I have done thousands of those checks in my life, and it is one of the best things I ever do. The GP can check babies for problems and talk to mums about not sleeping and all the other issues.
That is the whole, rounded nature of maternity care. I now want to talk about Stroud maternity, because that is what I know about most and what we are missing most. First, it is a very much loved and valued service in Stroud and we are missing the six closed post-natal beds. As I have said, it is a stand-alone, midwife-led unit. That is unusual in this country, and it is a shame it is unusual, because it is a really good place to have intrapartum care, so it is something that I am really trying to promote. We have 1,000 live births in Stroud a year, and at the moment only about 300 take place at Stroud maternity unit, but as I have said, there are lower levels of intervention and there is increased maternal satisfaction. For that reason, we must get these beds open again; they have been closed since 2022.
I want to make a few points about post-natal care, because often people say, “Oh, it’s a luxury; we can’t really afford it.” It is not a luxury. There is very good evidence that for certain families, certain mothers, good post-natal care saves a huge amount of money later on. It is about making sure that the baby and the mother bond properly and that breastfeeding starts properly. It is about making sure that they have a couple of days away from, perhaps, a number of other children and properly bond and that mothers learn how to look after babies. A lot of my colleagues say, “Well, post-natal care, we don’t really need that,” but we do need it. If we lose it, it will cost the country more, but it is also part of the whole maternity service. That is the first thing I would say.
Secondly, the people at the CQC have stipulated various things. The CQC is about safety, which none of us can argue about. However, some of its decisions, I feel, do not make sense and all they do is give safety to the organisation and not to the mother. For example, postnatal beds are being closed because it insists on having two midwives on the unit at all times; that makes it safe. However, closing the post-natal beds means that all these mothers have to go home. Are they safer at home or are they safer at hospital, with maternity care assistants and other nursing staff? I would say that the safety of the mother is better served with those post-natal beds open, even if there is just an on-call midwife as a second midwife. I want to slightly question the logic of the CQC—we must go back to it—so one of the things that I will do after this debate is write to the inspectors and arrange a meeting with them, because we must consider the safety of the mother and the child first. This is not about covering the organisation and making that safe; it is about making the mother safe, so I would iterate that as well.
There is something else that we have been doing. The League of Friends at Stroud hospital in general and at the maternity hospital is fabulous and has been providing extra services for post-natal and antenatal mums for some time. We now have an interim plan whereby we are going to open a sort of day hospital in the maternity unit so that at least mothers can come and have a bath while someone else looks after their baby, for example, and they can receive advice from health visitors and midwives. That is an interim plan. I do not want to say that it is a good replacement. We must get those post-natal beds open, so I am also due to meet the maternity and neonatal voices partnership, which is a crucial agent that we must talk to.
In summary, we need to train and, crucially, retain more midwives, because we have trained quite a lot of midwives who have almost immediately left the profession, as the hon. Member for Cheltenham was saying, because of stress. We need to secure a better working arrangement for them, and I look forward to my hon. Friend the Minister outlining plans to train thousands more midwives. We need to review CQC safety and make sure that the stand-alone nature of midwife units is fully understood by the CQC. We also have to make midwife working much more flexible. There could be on-call systems for these stand-alone units, so a second midwife does not need to be present if they are available to be called in. I have talked to midwives about that, and they seem happy to run that type of service. We also need a commitment from the ICB and the Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS foundation trust to reopen all six post-natal beds at Stroud maternity hospital.
Being continuously supported by a midwife during labour can prevent a situation from escalating dangerously. Proper support after the birth, however it went, can set families up for the early months by helping mothers to recuperate, establish feeding, talk through concerns and get to know their baby in a supportive environment.
The hon. Member for Stroud (Dr Opher) made a very good point about the importance of choice. There can be a sense that it is a luxury—people make these choices because they have an idealised view of how birth should go—but, as my own experience demonstrated, the manner of the birth can have significant, long-term consequences for the mother and baby, so choice is not a luxury. It is important to understand that in childbirth feeling comfortable allows hormones to flow, and that promotes the best chances of a successful, uncomplicated birth, which is obviously the ideal. Some people take comfort in knowing that they have the very best, high-tech facilities on hand in case there is an emergency. For others, it is about knowing that they are in a familiar environment—their home or a birthing unit that they feel comfortable in. Choice is important, not because it is a nice thing for mothers to have but because it has potentially long-term consequences on the physical and mental health of the mother and baby.
I am concerned that two years after the joint report on safe staffing from the all-party parliamentary groups on baby loss and maternity, staff levels are still frequently inadequate. We want to see a cross-Government target and strategy, led by the Department of Health and Social Care, for eliminating maternal health disparities, providing guaranteed mental health support and establishing a new workforce plan, backed up with adequate funding and an expansion of the maternity and neonatal workforce.