Dr. Eithne N? Longphuirt:

I agree with everything Professor McCarthy said. I do not want to repeat anything others have said.

On the questions about dads, we are seeing LGBT+ people and families who do not look like the traditional family more often in the health service. The other piece is having a service and training that allows the clinicians working with people to feel competent, able and resourced. We have Dads, Mums, Moms and many people who go by lots of different labels and it is important we learn how to provide those people with a good service.

Two issues we were talking about come to mind in respect of the combined care of the mother and the infant. The perinatal services could do more both structurally and with the staff we have to be accessible to infants and mums. We are working in portacabins. We have a lack of spaces and are not able to see all of the different pieces that need to be seen. In our statement we mentioned the idea of infant mental health practitioners and what we mean is practitioners who can work with the dyad - mums and infants or dads and infants together - to ensure the early relationship is nurtured.

The other piece relates to when children move from the neonatal intensive care unit, NICU, to the paediatric intensive care unit, PICU, for example from the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street to Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Crumlin when they are very sick. If their mother is still in the maternity hospital, they are separated. The fact that those resources are in separate hospitals has a major impact on the mother's ability to visit her infant. That was exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic when parents were separated from their infants and were not able to visit them. That happens within hospitals sometimes because it can be difficult for staff to support parents to visit their child in the NICU and to be present when the child is feeding or at other crucial points so they can realise the role of being a parent from the start, no matter how sick their infant might be. Again staff training on that subject is required, but the co-location of hospitals also has a major impact on parents when their child is very sick.