She said while most people were treated the way they should be, it was a “really confusing system”.<\/p>\n
“For most people, it’s the very first time you’re encountering the system,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It’s hard to navigate and it’s hard to understand why they’re phoning England when they should be phoning here and they get treatment here.”<\/p>\n
In a statement, the DoH said it had worked to raise public awareness on how to access abortion care \u2013 including across social media channels.<\/p>\n
It said it considered its arrangements with BPAS as the provider of a central access point for abortion services in Northern Ireland “to be working efficiently within the available funding envelope”.<\/p>\n
It added that it met regularly with BPAS to discuss a range of issues including the referral pathway.<\/p>\n
The department said it anticipated that the number of women travelling from Northern Ireland to England and Wales would “continue to trend downwards with services and access information available locally”.<\/p>\n
The five health and social care trusts in Northern Ireland which operate clinics and hospitals provide abortion services. <\/p>\n
The Belfast, Northern, Southern and Western trusts offer abortions for pregnancies up to 12 weeks.<\/p>\n
Those beyond 12 weeks should be referred to a clinic in the South Eastern Trust, which carries out surgical procedures up to 20 weeks’ gestation, as well as up to 24 weeks for those who have gone through the regional foetal medicine service.<\/p>\n
Alliance Party health spokesperson Nuala McAllister said she was “surprised” and “concerned” by the number of women who travelled in 2023.<\/p>\n
She said she believed it was because they had “no idea” about what services are available.<\/p>\n
“Whenever I did a quick Google search of what’s available, as an elected representative, it was heard for me to actually find out information,” she said.<\/p>\n
“And so we’re having women in a very vulnerable position having to travel for abortions when they should rightly and deserve to get that access here.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She said while most people were treated the way they should be, it was a “really confusing system”.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":478130,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-478129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478129\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/478130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}