ARC has received funding to carry out a project to help improve care for women in England facing a termination of pregnancy after a diagnosis of fetal anomaly.
Almost all hospitals in England now offer screening tests between 11 and 13 weeks of pregnancy. This means more parents are given a diagnosis of a problem affecting their baby earlier in pregnancy. Part of the drive behind providing earlier diagnosis was to enable those women who decide to end the pregnancy to have a choice of termination method.
In most cases before 20 weeks, a woman should be able to choose between having her pregnancy ended surgically (the pregnancy is removed under general anaesthetic) or medically (labour is induced by using drugs to end the pregnancy). We know, in reality, the choice of surgical termination is often not available after 13 weeks of pregnancy.
While there may sometimes be a clinical reason for only offering a medical termination, more often women do not know that they could have a choice. We aim to address this by working closely with parents and professionals within the NHS and the independent service providers: MSI (Marie Stopes International) and bpas (British Pregnancy Advisory Service). We are collaborating so we can design a care pathway that will help health professionals go as far as they can to meet the needs of individual women. We want each individual woman to be able to have the type of procedure that she can best cope with at such a distressing time.
We would like ARC members to help us by completing a questionnaire about their experience. What you tell us will help us to design a pathway that will help ensure parents are offered the very best care at such a sensitive time. The information you give us will remain anonymous. This questionnaire will be available to complete until 1 March 2012.
If you have any concerns, questions, or want to discuss anything about the project, please contact us on 0845 077 2290 (0207 713 7486 if you are calling from a mobile) or email info@arc-uk.org.
Thank you,
Jane Fisher
Director