Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

This is a source of frustration for women and their partners, for me and for the HSE as well. I asked for an update for the committee today in case any member wanted to raise it. The situation right now is that there is very clear guidance on daily visits for a minimum of 30 minutes, for the anomaly scan, neonatal intensive care and birth right from the start, including when induced, and right through. It has not always been possible to facilitate visits in the multi-occupancy antenatal wards before labour. This is for infection prevention and control reasons. Often, pre-Covid it would have been the case that visiting arrangements on antenatal wards would have had to be mindful of the women there.

In addition, building on the guidelines for planned attendances, the HSE has advised that updated guidance was issued on 24 June relating to unplanned attendances or emergency presentations because that has been a real issue. It is arguably the most important time, so work was done on that. The HSE has advised me that the acute operations office and the national women and infants programme have engaged across the six hospital groups to confirm compliance across the 19 maternity services. The responses we have received this week are as follows: 18 of the 19 units are fully compliant, with partners being allowed in the early assessment units; 12 of the 19 are fully compliant with high-risk pregnancy visits; and 15 of the 19 are fully compliant with emergency presentation visits. I am engaging with the HSE to get that up to full compliance across all 19 units. Compliance is a lot higher than it was. We pushed for compliance on the four original criteria and then we moved on to early attendance and emergency. That is moving at pace but there is not full compliance yet. Like Senator Hoey, I am aware of very difficult individual cases requiring emergency presentations where there is still not access for the partner. That is causing huge grief and huge problems for the women and their partners as well. We have to keep working with the HSE to get full compliance across all 19 units.