2. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd on 29 March 2022.
3. Will the First Minister make a statement on the effect of COVID on maternity services in South Wales West? OQ57865
Thank you very much to the Member for that question.
Maternity services across Wales were classed as essential services throughout the pandemic, including those in South Wales West. Despite significant challenges due to COVID, nearly all our services have continued to operate fully, providing pregnant mothers, babies and their families with access to safe and suitable maternity care.
Diolch, Brif Weinidog. A constituent of mine from the Swansea valley, named Laura, recently got in contact with me about her awful experience of having to undergo pregnancy scans on her own without her husband due to COVID rules. Since COVID restrictions and measures came into place two years ago, she's unfortunately had three consecutive miscarriages. Two of these were classed as 'missed miscarriages' and required a number of scans at Neath Port Talbot Hospital to ascertain the viability of the pregnancies—the first in September 2020, the second in August 2021. She said:
'During both of these extremely painful and difficult times, I, like many other prospective mothers in Wales, was not allowed to have my husband at the scans, and had to be told on both occasions that the foetus was not viable and that I would lose the pregnancy on my own with nobody there to provide comfort or support. Instead I was led to a small waiting room, told I could leave when I was ready. I then had to go out and tell my husband the news myself, when he was waiting anxiously outside in the car park.'
Last week, she had to face the same ordeal. Thankfully, it was good news. While I understand, of course, that hospitals have had to introduce and maintain strict rules to safeguard against COVID infection, there is a fundamental issue of inconsistency of approach here. Laura tells me that, by last year, pregnant women were allowed to have a partner present during some scans. However, this was not the case for the type of scans she needed—scans that are only allowed in the NHS when there are potential problems or risks. Prif Weinidog, as Wales enters a new phase in the pandemic, will the Government ensure better treatment for all the other women across Wales who have suffered and will be affected by this potentially traumatic situation, by looking at the guidance issued to health boards and ensuring a consistent and appropriate approach to maternity services?
Llywydd, I thank the Member for that question. I feel enormous sympathy for the individual whose circumstances she related. During the whole of the pandemic, some of the most difficult circumstances that have had to have been faced by the NHS have been over maternity care and the involvement of both partners in what should, in normal circumstances, be one of the most exciting times in their lives. But, as I've explained many times on the floor of the Senedd, the decision about whether people can be involved has had to be a clinical decision, made by the person who has the best opportunity to make sure that the health of the mother and the health of the unborn baby can be protected to the maximum possible extent. And that depends upon the health of the mother, for example, her vulnerabilities, underlying health conditions and so on, as well as the prevailing circumstances in whatever premises that care is being carried out. And it hasn't been right during the pandemic so far to have tried to issue a set of rules from Cathays Park that would override the necessary clinical judgment that can only be applied by the person who has responsibility for the overall care of the mother and the unborn child.
As we emerge, as we hope, from the worst effects of the pandemic, the Welsh Government will be providing advice to the NHS as a whole. It will, for example, seek to standardise the length of visits that families are able to make while somebody is in hospital, to make sure that the approach to lateral flow testing is consistent across Wales, and that the circumstances in which both parents can be involved, and of course want to be involved, in that whole experience is also consistent from one part of the NHS to another. We're able to do that because the impact of vaccination, new treatments we have, the way in which the NHS has learnt to deal with the impact of COVID-19, enables us now to move into that phase of providing maternity care. But, at the depths of the pandemic, the view taken by those who advise us in the Welsh Government was that that sort of national approach had to give way to the need to allow clinicians to exercise the judgment that only they can exercise, in order to safeguard the health of mothers and unborn children.
Thank you, Sioned Williams, for raising this important issue. Good afternoon, First Minister. During the height of the pandemic, we saw huge restrictions placed on new mums and their families, who were not allowed to visit them in hospital. The charity and campaign group Birthrights has monitored the impact across the UK to articulate the challenges that many have faced. Apparently, they wrote to the health Minister asking for change, saying Wales has
'some of the most restrictive visiting arrangements in maternity services in the UK.'
Does the First Minister believe that the impact on families at such an important time should be considered in the context of human rights, and whether those rights were respected? Thank you.
Well, there's no greater right, Llywydd, it seems to me, than to make sure that the system is not putting you at risk and causing you harm, and what some people describe as restrictions I think are more fairly described as protections, because that's what we were offering here in Wales. That is not, for a minute, to deny the heartache that that has caused people. But the motivation for the way in which services are provided has only ever been to make sure that those families to which Altaf Hussain referred, that they were not unnecessarily put at risk. We have been in the throes of a global pandemic that has killed people here in Wales every single week, and the actions that our clinicians have taken and our health boards have taken have only ever been designed to make sure that people going through something that will be part of their lives forever, as they will hope, don't find that adversely affected because the protections that could have been provided to them were not provided to them. And difficult as that has been, I don't think for a minute that we ought to do anything other than recognise that the reasons that those actions were taken were to protect those families, to protect those women, to protect the babies that they were hoping to give birth to, and, as we move beyond the pandemic, we will be able to return to different ways and better ways, of course, of doing things. But that's the reason those actions were taken and nothing else.