Professor Anne Matthews:

I wish to come in on maternity care specifically. We on this side of the Border would have envied maternity care in Northern Ireland because it was a different model of care. It was more midwife-led and more birthing unit than consultant-led. My own research was on midwifery empowerment way back when. A lot of midwives who trained in the UK and came back to Ireland were shocked at the lack of autonomy for midwives in the Irish maternity system. We now have another ambitious maternity care strategy for the Republic. Its implementation is slow.

Unfortunately, it is probably an area where we are seeing a convergence of more negative development than one improving to meet the other. Drogheda was mentioned. There is a midwife led-unit there and there are services in Cavan and Letterkenny linked to various pathways. We certainly need a huge improvement in midwife-led care and community-based and home-based care from midwives. Our system was so based on hospital-based, consultant-led care for all women, whether they were low risk maternity or not. There are all those other areas such as liaison with mental health services and other specialisms which are needed as well. The slow implementation of the Irish maternity care strategy is regrettable.