Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to enable more midwifes to be qualified tongue tie practitioners.

Student midwives are trained to look for tongue ties as part of the routine new born examination that midwives undertake after birth. However, they are not always easily identifiable at this stage and may not become apparent until babies have feeding problems.

It is for the National Health Service locally to ensure appropriate services are available for the diagnosis and treatment of tongue tie. Tongue tie practitioners may be registered nurses, doctors or midwives and they undertake specialist post-registration training to do this based on organisational need.