Dr. Colm Henry:

I will go through the Senator's points. I absolutely agree with him. Our staff in the 19 maternity units want to be able to go back to a situation whereby partners can be full partners in every sense of the word during the whole process of childbirth, which, as the Senator says, is a difficult and anxious time. It is mostly a happy time but sometimes, of course, as the Senator outlined, there are difficulties and bad news. That is precisely why we are looking at this latest visitor guidance this week. We are amending it to look at exactly those areas where there may be difficult news and particular anxiety, that is, those early pregnancy assessment units, people with high-risk pregnancies and people presenting in emergency situations in later pregnancy. I mentioned earlier that nobody wanted to put in these restrictions but we were faced with overwhelming Covid disease and threat in January. It threatened to destabilise our hospital system and, in fact, it did destabilise it. There were multiple outbreaks in various settings. Fifteen of those 19 units are co-located with general hospitals. Those measures were put in place, as were the general visiting restriction measures, which also caused great distress to relatives and sick people in general hospitals and in nursing homes. The measures were put in place in order to try to protect people as much as possible from the worst effects of this virus. It is exactly those areas the Senator outlines that we are trying to focus on now as we return to some kind of normality.

The Senator mentioned labour. The practice has been, and the advice is very clear, that partners should be present in labour wards. Sometimes women go back to antenatal wards after initial assessment. Many of our units, which are not modern by any stretch of the imagination, are multiple occupancy wards and, as such, it was not the practice pre pandemic to have partners there constantly when other women occupy the wards. What we are trying to standardise and to bring into practice, and what we have in those 19 units, is that a partner have every right to be present in the labour ward during labour. What we are not able to commit to, however, based on the varying infrastructure of hospitals, is that people be present in the antenatal ward where it is a multiple occupancy ward because of the rights and privacy requirements of other women on that ward.

These are heartbreaking stories. As I said, our staff, our working nurses and doctors, want to see pre-pandemic visiting practices return but they have had a very difficult few months themselves trying to keep women safe, to protect pregnancies and to protect women during what was certainly the worst surge of Covid-19 in January and February, during which we learned Covid is not without danger and risk to pregnancies and to women.