To ask the Minister of Health to detail the number of postnatal contacts for new mothers and their babies that were (i) clinic-based; and (ii) home visit-based, in the last three years, broken down by Health and Social Care Trust.

All five Health and Social Care Trusts (HSCTs) have advised that they are unable to provide a breakdown of postnatal contacts by clinicbased and homevisitbased activity, as their systems do not record contacts in this way and providing such detail would require an unfeasible manual trawl of individual records.

The Northern HSCT has recently moved to electronic recording of postnatal contacts and is therefore able to provide indicative data from 2025 onwards. This shows that approximately 57% of contacts in that year were home visits and 42% were delivered in clinic settings. The Belfast, South Eastern and Western HSCTs have each confirmed that postnatal contacts are delivered primarily through home visits.

The default approach in all Trusts for routine postnatal contacts within the first 10 days following birth is a home visit. While clinicbased or telephone contacts may be provided where clinically appropriate or at the request of the mother, home visiting remains the standard and preferred model of postnatal care.