NHS failure on Down’s screening kills healthy babies

Only one in three hospitals offer pregnant women the best tests to test if their baby has Down's Syndrome. Scores of healthy foetuses die every year because most hospitals do not give pregnant women a test that is according the NHS the best test for Down's Syndrome. Other tests are more likely to give a "false positive". The death rate is higher than it should be because only one in three hospital offer the mother-to-be a so-called combined test for Down's Syndrome. It's the most accurate of the four methods the NHS uses to calculate the woman's chances of having a child with Down's. If every hospital provided the combined test, the total of what Doctor Anne Mackie calls "normal babies lost" would be around 90. Now 146 babies die as a result of efforts to detect children with Down's syndrome. The 146 foetuses have no neurological damage but die when miscarry as a result of having the amniocentesis test. Doctors told the mothers that their babies have a high risk of having the syndrome. About 60,000 people in the UK have Down's. It is the biggest cause of learning disabillities. Women who become pregnant after 35 have a higher risk on having a baby with down's syndrome, especially after the age of 40.

I do not understand why the hospitals who still use the amniocentesis test do not move on to the combined tests. If it's cheaper than the new test, then that should not matter. Lives are at stake here. Or mothers-to-be should get a choice, what kind of test they want. I think there are always risks of losing a child but according to this article that risk could be drastically decreased if more hospitals just change the test. Maybe the government could give a compensation to the hospitals if the test is more expensive than the older versions. Maybe then the NHS could reach the target of having more hospitals to provide the combined test.