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Aontú Newry and Armagh representative Roisin Mulgrew has called for urgent action to protect inpatient maternity services at Daisy Hill Hospital after the Southern Trust confirmed it has contingency plans to temporarily move births and inpatient maternity care to Craigavon. Mulgrew said the news would be deeply worrying for mothers, staff and families in Newry, south Armagh and the wider area, and said Daisy Hill maternity must be protected.
Mulgrew said giving birth was one of the most important moments in a mother's life, and that women deserved to know they would have safe, high-quality maternity care available as close to home as possible. "I fully accept that patient safety must come first," she said. "Aontú supports safe staffing levels and the principle of one-to-one midwifery care during labour. But the answer to a staffing crisis must be to recruit, retain and properly resource the staff necessary to provide a safe service, not to allow staffing problems to become so bad that they're used as another excuse for stripping services out of Daisy Hill."
She said 1,713 babies were born at Daisy Hill in the last year, while Craigavon delivered 2,768 babies during the same period, and questioned where the planning had been before the Trust reached the point of assessing what additional capacity would be required at Craigavon. Mulgrew said services at Daisy Hill had been warned about for years, recalling that maternity services were temporarily suspended in June when staffing fell below safe levels, with services resuming once medical cover was secured, although the underlying staffing problems remained.
Mulgrew said she found some of the political reaction to the news "extraordinary," pointing to representatives from Sinn Féin, the SDLP, DUP and UUP expressing concern and promising to fight for Daisy Hill. She said it was particularly remarkable to see a UUP councillor presenting himself as part of the campaign against the situation when the Health Minister responsible was himself a UUP MLA, and said the UUP could not direct public anger towards the Trust without answering questions about the political direction of health policy being pursued by its own Minister.
She said the main Stormont parties, Sinn Féin, the SDLP, UUP, DUP and Alliance, had for a decade supported the Bengoa transformation agenda and the reconfiguration of the health service, yet lined up to oppose the loss of services in their own constituencies when the consequences of centralisation arrived at local hospitals. "They cannot have it both ways," she said. "You cannot support greater centralisation and reconfiguration at Stormont and then act as though threats to services in Newry, Causeway, Fermanagh and elsewhere have appeared from nowhere."
Mulgrew said geography, rural communities, border communities and transport infrastructure all mattered, and that a mother in Crossmaglen being asked to travel much further to give birth was not an abstract exercise in healthcare restructuring but one with real consequences for her and her family. She said that when Robbie Butler became Health Minister, she had called on him to come to Newry to listen to those in the SOS Daisy Hill campaign, staff, patients and the community, and said he now had an opportunity to demonstrate a different approach, with the wider health service required to exhaust every possible option for securing the medical cover necessary to keep births at Daisy Hill.
Mulgrew said Daisy Hill should not be managed down service by service, but should be properly staffed, invested in and allowed to thrive as a hospital serving the entire border region. As a member of the SOS Daisy Hill committee, she said she had been part of the campaign alongside the community, and that Aontú had been involved from its founding. "Daisy Hill has already lost too much," she said. "Maternity must not be next."
