Speeches by Craft.

“Janet, this is to you. My apologies for being a bit late this morning. I wanted to clarify what you were saying. Is there a general feeling in the profession that midwife-led, low-intervention maternal care achieves better outcomes, but black women are not necessarily accessing that in the way that they should? The pur…”

“I am trying to get to the nub of low intervention in maternity care. That midwife one tends to have slightly better outcomes. Could the fact that black women are currently prevented from accessing that as fully as they should be something that is driving poor outcomes?”

“I imagine that it has knock-on effects. You may see the impact on the child’s life chances. It could be endless, really.”

“Professor Shehata, how well are medical professionals currently supported to identify medical conditions such as jaundice or rashes in black women and babies?”

“We have touched on it quite a lot already, but I wanted to look a little more at training. Specifically, would you support cultural competency training becoming mandatory? Are there moves to make it that way?”

“Sylvia, you said that it should not just be a tick box but actually immersive. Would that be something along the lines of continual professional development?”

“I am assuming that it would be across the board, so midwives, managers and senior management.”

“Would you imagine an initial, like you said, fairly immersive thing, where you could potentially even say, “I have done this training. I am qualified in this,” but then a continually—”

“There is training that exists, an e-learning package. Have you had any feedback from people who have done the training?”

“I was going to ask how you measure that, but if you are not collecting the data—”

“I do not think the previous panel would disagree with that—I do not want to put words in their mouths; they are still in the room—but I think they would say that, at the moment, the level of cultural competency training for people who work in the whole maternal space is so very low, and that is having an impact across …”

“Organisations that have given evidence to this Committee, including the previous panel, have called for mandatory training on cultural competency. Indeed, when I asked this question to the previous panel, they were fairly unanimous in their response about whether that would go some way to addressing the concerns around…”

“Would you support mandatory training on cultural competency?”

“One of the concerns that has been raised, particularly by the previous panel, is that there is no mandatory training across the board. Cultural competency is not included on midwifery training programmes. The availability of cultural competency courses in university training courses is fairly low, if it is offered at a…”

“How do you do that?”

“I am glad that the Minister is explaining how capturing feedback and experience is being allowed for in other parts of the Bill. To clarify, in my own head I feel that the clause aims to capture the experience immediately after it has happened, just as hospitals offer women who have just given birth the opportunity to …”

“I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision for the inclusion of a parent’s details on a child’s birth certificate where that parent has died before the birth of the child; and for connected purposes. For the vast majority of parents, registering the birth of their child is a straightforward…”

“I am equally confused; I did not think we were talking about an amendment. I thought we were talking about a clause. Apologies.”

“Without wanting to sound abrupt, we all have the explanatory notes and are reading them, so in the interests of brevity might the hon. Member consider getting to the point about what he would add to or take away from the Bill? We all know what the clauses aim to do; the Minister has already set that out.”

“Like many Committee members, I was deeply confused about how we were proceeding. On the face of it, the clause broadly seems as if it should be part of any Act about mental health care, including post discharge. I have spoken about my own experience of interacting with the Mental Health Act as it stands. I might have f…”