Nursing and Midwifery (Amendment) Order 2017 — House of Lords, 2017-02-28
Topic: Health
James O’Shaughnessy (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for his interest in this matter, and although naturally I am disappointed by his amendment to the Motion, I will use the opportunity afforded by it to aim to reassure him and all noble Lords that the proposed changes in this order are consistent with the Government’s commitment to strengthening the midwifery profession while also ensuring public protection. In addition, I am aware that the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has brought this order to the special attention of the House, and I will address the concerns of the committee in my remarks. I know that the House will agree that it is vital for all women to be able to give birth in a safe, high-quality environment. This Government are committed to ensuring maternity services are the best and safest they can be. However, it is also true that things can and do go wrong, often with devastating impacts on mothers and babies but also on husbands, partners, parents, siblings and extended family members. Any good system of policy and regulation must promote best practice while also preparing to respond to mistakes when they happen In October 2016, Safer Maternity Care was published. It set out an action plan for the Government’s vision to make NHS maternity services some of the safest in the world and to achieve our national ambition to halve, by 2030, the rates of stillbirths, neonatal deaths and brain injuries that occur during or soon after birth and maternal deaths, with an interim aim of a reduction of 20% by 2020. Midwives are key to achieving this ambition. Because of this Government’s actions, there are more than 2,100 additional full-time equivalent midwives on our maternity units since 2010, and a further 6,300 are in training Midwives do a critically important job caring for mothers and babies and I pay tribute to the work that they do, which my family has been privileged to benefit from. However, when mistakes are made, it is right that they must be properly investigated. This order is before noble Lords partly in response to concerns raised during investigations into systematic failures in the care of mothers and babies at Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust. As noble Lords know, following the completion of a number of investigations into complaints from families of those affected by the tragic events at Morecambe Bay, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman highlighted that, "the midwifery supervision and regulatory arrangements at the local level failed to identify poor midwifery practice" A subsequent report by the King’s Fund described the system of local investigations as a "sub-FTP"—fitness-to-practise—"investigatory process", which, "causes confusion … and can result in a lack of clarity for providers over their responsibility" Similar concerns were raised in Dr Bill Kirkup’s Morecambe Bay investigation report, which referenced the, "remarkable conflicts of interest inherent in a single individual combining the roles of risk manager, supervisor of midwives, senior midwife and staff-side representative" The report also stated that, "the supervisory system as applied in Morecambe Bay … lacked objectivity and failed repeatedly to identify the evident problems in the unit or alert others to them" All three reports that I have just quoted from recommended that urgent change was needed to ensure a clear separation between regulation and supervision of midwives.