Dr. Catherine Conlon:

Yes. They had gone through the service in Ireland. Of the people we spoke to, if their anomaly was detected in a non-providing hospital or in a hospital that did not have the diagnosis capacity, they would be referred to a tertiary hospital where the diagnostic care would be carried out and the treatment administered and then they would be returned to their referring hospital for any follow-up care. That is what the model of care anticipates.

One of the things with post-termination supports or supports around the termination in cases of foetal anomaly is that we have had a developed infrastructure of crisis pregnancy counselling services that have tended to be in the community prior to 2018. They have not tended to be in the hospital services so one of the things our study recommended was that there should be a recalibration of those services to make them more available for people going through the foetal anomaly-----