Joanne Collins (Sinn Fein)

I raise the issue around the treatment of mothers and families who experience miscarriages. Too often women going through the most devastating moments of their lives are placed in the same wards or have to use the same entrances to the hospital as parents leaving with their newborn babies. It is an extra agony they have walking in to the hospital. For those grieving the loss of a pregnancy, it is an additional and unnecessary trauma. A mother who contacted me after her own loss felt unseen and said that she did not receive the same treatment she would have received if she had her baby. She felt it was cold and callous. When she became pregnant for a second time, she sadly miscarried again. The only saving grace for her, which gave her a little relief, was that she did not have to return to the maternity hospital.

It is a little unfair that a woman who is miscarrying feels a sense of relief just because she does not have to go back to a hospital. It just seems as if there is something missing. The majority of staff in maternity hospitals are unbelievably caring and compassionate, but the structures around them seem to be failing. Parents experiencing miscarriages deserve privacy, dignity and care, not the grief that is compounded when they have to use the same entrance or go onto the same ward where they can hear babies crying.At the very least there should be separate entrances. There was an amazing grief counsellor in University Maternity Hospital Limerick. The grief counselling used to happen in the room next to the neonatal ward where many of the parents would have lost their babies. She fought for two years solid and got a Portakabin put outside. It is not ideal, but at least those parents do not have to walk up to that neonatal ward. I ask the Leader to take this back to the Minster for Health to prioritise improvements in this area, even if it is just separate entrances for these parents who are going through one of the most traumatic times of their lives.