Hansard

I thank Rhoda Grant for bringing this important debate to the chamber to mark world prematurity day.

As we have heard from Malcolm Chisholm, in Scotland 8,000 babies a year are born too soon, too small or too sick. The care that premature babies receive during their first few minutes, hours, days, weeks or months impacts on the rest of their lives. For mums, dads and grandparents, that time can be one of the hardest and most anxious times that they will go through.

I speak from experience: my youngest son, Luca, was born at 33 weeks and weighed just 3.5 pounds. Like many mums, I had absolutely no warning that he would be premature. On the day he was born, we had driven back from holiday, arrived home at about 6.30 and sat down for tea. All of a sudden, I felt a pain that I knew was not a good sign. We rushed straight to the hospital in Kirkcaldy in time for Luca to be born just after eight o’clock. We saw him very briefly before he was whisked away. I was left in shock, holding a photograph of my new baby that the midwife had given me. That was me until the next morning, when I was able to visit Luca for the very first time in the neonatal high-dependency unit.

That was the start of a very long and stressful three weeks. All I wanted to do was hold my new baby and take him home, but there he was in an incubator, all wired up and being fed through tubes. Doctors and nurses were now his primary carers; as parents, we felt that we were watching from the sidelines. The care that Luca received from all the staff at Forth Park hospital in Kirkcaldy during that time was first class, but there is no doubt that, as a family, it was one of the most scary and stressful periods of our lives.

Thanks to our fantastic national health service in Scotland, Luca is now an extremely healthy and vibrant three-year-old. However, I never forget how lucky we are that he was born here in Scotland, because around the world every year 15 million babies are born too soon and 1 million of those babies die: premature birth kills one baby every 30 seconds somewhere in the world. That is a shocking statistic that is all the more shocking because 75 per cent of those deaths could be easily prevented by keeping babies clean, warm and close to their mum and by breastfeeding—proven low-cost interventions that can and do save little lives.

I am really pleased that here in Scotland we now have a comprehensive set of new standards for care of premature babies. It is vital now that we work to ensure that they are fully implemented. Central to that must be parental involvement and engagement. Parents whose babies are in special care are faced with multiple worries—not only about the immediate health of their baby, but about whether their baby will face long-term health problems. They also have worries about leaving their baby behind in hospital, about how they are going to manage looking after their other children, about how they can afford the petrol for the constant trips back and forward to hospital, about how their partner will manage to get time off work after their two-week paternity leave is over and, for some, about whether their little one will ever make it home.

Families deserve better support in neonatal units than they have at present. As other members have said, lack of accommodation means that it is very difficult for parents to spend time bonding with their baby in the early days. Lack of crèche facilities in hospitals means that it is very difficult for parents who have other young children to manage. We know how important breastfeeding is, but breastfeeding can be extremely difficult for parents of premature babies when they are kept apart from their baby and have to travel back and forward to their home from a hospital that might be quite far away.

When my son was in special care, I remember being shown a corner of the ward where mothers could express milk behind a curtain. However, there was hardly any privacy, so it did not surprise me that that facility was rarely used. If neonatal services are to be family friendly, mums and dads need to be fully involved in shaping them. When your baby is in a neonatal unit, it is very easy to feel that you are a bystander. That situation needs to change. Parents need to be at the centre of the care. The new standards will go a long way towards helping to deliver the family-centred approach that we need. I hope that the Scottish Government will make the standards a reality as soon as possible in order to ensure that premature and sick babies have the best possible care and quality of life.

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