Meeting of the Parliament 08 May 2019
I am grateful to the Labour Party for bringing the debate to Parliament, and I assure it of our support. The debate comes hot on the heels of the international day of the midwife.
I cannot think of another healthcare professional, other than general practitioners, with whom every member of the chamber will have had some association. It is usually on the first day of our lives, but many people have subsequent interaction with midwives during the births of their children.
At 6 pm on Palm Sunday five years ago, my wife went into labour with our third child. The first two labours—those of our boys—had been protracted over a number of days, so we thought that we had quite a lot of time. I took a leisurely trip to Dalkeith to drop off the boys with their granny. When I was on the bypass, I discovered to my horror that Gill was timing her contractions at two minutes apart, so we realised that things were moving at pace. I got her into the car and got back on to the bypass, at which point she went into transition, which is quite terrifying when you are driving at 70mph.
My wife insisted that I phone the midwives at the Royal infirmary, and I said that we were coming in hot and that I would not be able to park the car. I said that I would need to dump the car at the door, because the baby was coming now. They said that that was fine and that I should pull up outside the door. When we pulled up, three midwives were ready and waiting for us at the door. It turns out that I had gone to school with one of the midwives. She told me that as I got out of the car, but she said, “That’s not important right now, because your wife is about to have a baby.”
There was 11 minutes between the doorway and the delivery of Darcy, our third child, who was happy, healthy and well cared for. During those 11 minutes, we were carried in very confident hands. We had an excellent experience, and I know that such experiences are replicated in hospitals around the country every day. The profession has our great thanks.
It is easy to think of midwives as working only in a hospital setting, but they do so much in our communities, too. My party makes a great deal about the need for more adequate perinatal mental health support services. We forget that midwives pick up the first signs of postnatal depression or other mental health difficulties that are associated with childbirth. We need to address that key issue, which affects the early days when we are trying to give our children the best start in life.
Given subsequent policy developments, we have asked midwives to do more with less. For example, a midwife will be the first named person that a child will get in their first days of life, before that role is handed over to a health visitor. As was the case with the best start grant, midwives were not involved in the creation of that policy initiative, which was a serious misstep.
We are asking midwives to do more with less. By “less”, I refer to the calamitous decision that was taken by the then health secretary and now First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, in cutting the number of training places by a fifth, which has resulted in 300 places being lost to the profession. That point has been made several times during the debate. There is no doubt about the causal relationship between the myopic decision to cut the number of training places and the subsequent increase in the vacancy rate to 5 per cent.
I thank the Labour Party for securing the debate. We will support Labour’s motion, we will reject the Government’s amendment because it glosses over some of the problems that the Labour Party has rightly raised, and we are happy to support the Conservatives’ amendment.
It is important that we have more such debates, because we often forget about midwives. They are more than just healthcare professionals; they offer counsel, succour and crucial advice, on which we all rely in those first sleep-deprived days of early parenthood. We often forget how much of a good start they give not only to our children but to us, as new parents.
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