Families with newborns in the Bristol region were 'abandoned at a time of need' during the pandemic, health chiefs have admitted.

Bosses at health and care provider Sirona told a council meeting that the Government’s emergency measures to redeploy most health visitors away from new parents and into adult services was the 'wrong decision' that would never be repeated.

The issue was highlighted by Healthwatch South Gloucestershire which gathered firsthand accounts from 118 mums in the district who gave birth between 2020-22 as well as from service providers.

Parents described their experiences as “pot luck”, with many feeling unsupported, including those suffering with depression, the patient watchdog’s report said.

Sirona head of public health nursing Nikki Lawrence told South Gloucestershire Council health scrutiny committee that it had been a mistake to temporarily change the roles of more than two-thirds of health visitors, who take over from midwives to care for families a couple of weeks after babies are born.

She said: “The national learning about redeployment – we have reflected on it, the Government has reflected on it and they have agreed it was the wrong decision to make.
“We basically abandoned families at a time of need, and that decision will never, ever be taken again, from what I’ve been told.

“In hindsight it was the wrong decision to make, and as your report showed, it did have a detrimental impact on families and we really regret that, but it was out of our hands.”

Ms Lawrence, who is responsible for NHS health visitors in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG), said: “During the covid pandemic it was the Department of Health’s directive to stop the Healthy Child programme which is what health visitors deliver to families.

“Seventy per cent of our staff in health visiting were redeployed into adult services, leaving just 30 per cent.

“So we concentrated on phoning families for antenatal contact, before the baby was born, and also for that new birth visit.

“The role of health visitors is to support parenting and provide holistic assessments and then refer and signpost on, but the issue for us during the pandemic was there were no services to refer on to.

“Mothers For Mothers, Bluebell, our usual routes of support didn’t exist anymore or were working in a very reduced way.

“So I’m absolutely delighted to say we have returned to full face-to-face visiting and we are going through a very ambitious transformation to embed service users’ voices in our programme and to make it a much more responsive service.