PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Bereavement Counselling: Perinatal Mortality (9 January 2017)

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what plans his Department has to improve the aftercare and bereavement counselling services for women and their families who have experienced miscarriage, stillbirth or infant death.

Asked by:
Mr Toby Perkins (Labour)

It is important that women and families who have experienced loss and bereavement are offered the right care and services to support them. NHS England is developing a ‘toolkit/resource pack’ to assist local services in capturing the experiences of loss and bereavement in a sensitive and evidence based manner. This will be used by Local Maternity Systems as they develop and implement action plans to transform maternity services in their locality.

In Our Commitment to you for end of life care: The Government Response to the Review of Choice in End of Life Care (2016), the Government committed the Department to ‘work with system and voluntary sector partners to identify bereavement care pathway exemplar models to be shared widely across the National Health Service so that for instance, a hospital in the East of England can learn from and implement the good bereavement practice of a service in the West’. This will help to ensure that all parents receive the appropriate level of bereavement care they need.

Answered by:
Philip Dunne (Conservative)
16 January 2017