Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to help reduce infant mortality rates at Queen’s Hospital in Romford.

Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust has taken a number of steps to improve their maternity services and help reduce infant mortality rates. This includes:

- implementing pre-term screening for pre-eclampsia;

- recruiting 164 more midwives since 2021, with seven more due to join soon, reducing the vacancy rate to 3.64% compared to 16% in January 2023;

- investing in additional clinical posts, including the recruitment of 12 additional obstetrics and gynaecology consultants since 2022, with two more joining soon, and increasing resident doctor numbers;

- introducing bilingual volunteers to support women throughout pregnancy, including attending appointments with them, and during labour;

- offering enhanced ‘continuity of carer’ in areas where health inequalities have been identified;

- increasing triage space and staffing to speed up initial assessment and creating a new discharge lounge to improve flow through the unit;

- increasing obstetric theatre capacity and staffing; and

- launching a new diabetes pre-conception clinic this year for women who are trying to conceive, and a new hybrid closed-loop insulin pump service for type 1 diabetics who are pregnant or trying to conceive.