10. Will the First Minister consider re-opening inpatient perinatal mental health facilities? OAQ(5)0526(FM

The decision on the inpatient perinatal mental health unit is a matter for the health boards and the Welsh Health Specialised Services Committee. But since 2016, the Welsh Government is investing an additional £1.5 million a year for all LHBs to provide community-based specialist perinatal mental health services.

I thank the First Minister for that answer. I hope he has the opportunity to hear the experiences of mothers in Wales who’ve had the courage to speak out on their individual experiences, like Charlotte Harding from Cardiff, whose husband took two years off work to care for her and their two boys after developing postpartum psychosis. I’ve applied the Welsh Government’s own criteria to the current situation in this country, based on the information I’ve obtained from LHBs, and they’re failing the Government’s own criteria. We know that it’s going to cost more to send Welsh mothers to inpatient centres in England than it would have to keep these facilities open in Wales and we know that community provision is patchy. But politics aside, can I plead with the First Minister to put, as a matter of urgency, this issue at the top of his agenda so that mothers in Wales do not face the choice of being separated from their newborn babies or separated from their families or, even worse, not having the mental health facilities that they deserve in their own country?

Can I just explain the situation? In the last three years, fewer than five women have been admitted to an inpatient unit in Wales. That’s the issue. The problem then, of course, is that you cannot run a specialist unit on those numbers. It can’t be done. No accrediting body will allow you to run a specialist unit on that basis. It can’t be a specialist unit with those numbers. I agree with him about the seriousness of the condition. I agree with him about not separating mothers from babies, which is why we put the extra funding into community-based perinatal mental health services to ensure that people don’t have to be inpatients. So, rather than focusing on the hospital, it is focusing on the individual, making sure they have support in the community, rather than trying to keep a service going that clearly wasn’t being particularly well used—and, as a result of that, there was a problem in terms of it continuing to be a specialist unit.

Thank you, First Minister.