Health and Social Care Committee

Paula Sherriff Excerpts

Thursday 28th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Dr Williams]

I thank the hon. Member for the contribution that she has made to the Health and Social Care Committee, and to our thoughts in developing these ideas. We learned during our inquiry that fathers often feel excluded—systematically excluded. Much of the literature and many of the interventions are targeted at mothers. Culturally, services tend to push fathers a little bit further away, rather than bringing them in.

We recommend that the healthy child programme becomes a healthy family programme, and of course we know that every family is different. Families have different members; in some families, grandparents play a huge role, and in others, a lesser role. Our main recommendation is about a cultural emphasis, or a cultural change, in the healthy child programme, to make it a more holistic family experience.

[Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on a very thoughtful—indeed, excellent—speech, and I look forward to reading the report in full. I am also very grateful to him for the work that he does on the all-party parliamentary group on the prevention of adverse childhood experiences.

I will talk a little about the service in my area through which mums who may be prone to post-natal depression are identified, even prior to conception. If men and women who are thinking of conceiving have a history of mental illness, or perhaps even fairly low-level depression or anxiety, they are identified, and the mental health support team work with that couple throughout pregnancy and then after the child is born. I note that my hon. Friend identified mental health as one of the key issues in relation to adverse childhood experiences, but would he welcome a wider roll-out of this kind of work, to support children’s first years?

[Dr Williams]

I thank my hon. Friend for emphasising maternal mental health. The Government have made significant progress in improving services, particularly for people with more severe perinatal health problems, but we still have too many cases where people are likely to develop mental health problems, even if those problems are not predicted, and who say they have mental health problems in the perinatal period, but services do not detect those problems. The National Childbirth Trust has estimated that perhaps up to 50% of mothers with perinatal mental health problems never get asked about their mental health. It is welcome that some areas of the country are responding to that issue in an assertive way and seeking to prevent perinatal mental health problems, rather than just detecting them early. However, we are left with a lottery, whereby some areas do this work exceptionally well, and other areas still have to catch up.

The idea of a local authority-led plan, with some central accountability, might help to bring the kind of services that are obviously being provided already in Dewsbury to many other parts of the country.