For many years now, The Parent Rooms have been campaigning for improved maternal mental health services in Northern Ireland.
For years, we have been raising our voices, sharing stories, and fighting alongside families and fellow advocates to demand the essential support our mothers urgently need in NI.
The recent BBC One NI ‘Spotlight : Mums in Crisis’ episode which features the heart-wrenching story of Shelley Browne, has once again brought light to the lack of perinatal mental health care in this region.
In this programme, Shelley explains how she was admitted to a generic psychiatric hospital for five weeks, without her newborn baby. She explains how she was alone, frightened, and unsupported at the most vulnerable times of her life.
Northern Ireland remains the only part of the UK without a single Mother and Baby Unit whilst the rest of the UK have 22 Mother and Baby Units providing specialist impatient care that keeps mothers and babies together during these times when they need each other most.
Over the years, we at The Parent Rooms have listened to stories similar to Shelleys, of fear, isolation, confusion, and grief in hopes to support the parents of NI who do not have access to the support and specialist care they need.
Northern Ireland has gone 20 years without the Mother and Baby Unit it so desperately needs, the business case remains unpublished, and still no funding has been allocated.
At The Parent Rooms, we see the effects of this daily. Whilst we provide vital community support to parents and children, only a Mother and Baby Unit can offer the specialist, life-saving psychiatric care mothers in our community deserve. The Exeter MBU, shown in this BBC programme, proves that although not perfect, a temporary unit can provide safe, specialist care for mothers and babies through recovery, whilst a permanent facility is in progress.
We stand by the Maternal Mental Health Alliance, our colleagues in the charity sector and our health service colleagues in the continued fight to provide this vital and life saving service. It’s time to deliver the care the mothers of Northern Ireland need and deserve.