No babies will be delivered at Daisy Hill Hospital in Newry if plans for a temporary suspension of services go ahead amid "significant" workforce pressures.

The Southern Trust has not been able to recruit consultant obstetricians to fill vacancies and it is preparing to temporarily move inpatient maternity services to Craigavon Area Hospital.

It said it "cannot run a safe maternity service without the required medical cover and unfortunately that is a position that the trust is having to plan for at this moment in time".

It is thought ante and postnatal clinics will continue in Newry but alternative arrangements will be made for women due to have their babies in Daisy Hill from November.

Trust chief executive Steve Spoerry said the health minister had asked the wider Northern Ireland health system to explore what support might be available to help maintain the service in Newry in the longer term.

"Contingency planning will consider the changes required at both hospitals, including the capacity needed at Craigavon Area Hospital to accommodate additional births and the provision of appropriate obstetric support for the Emergency Department at Daisy Hill Hospital," he said.

In the last year, 4,481 babies were born within the Southern Trust's two maternity services: 1,713 at Daisy Hill Hospital and 2,768 at Craigavon Area Hospital.

Colm McCafferty, director of children, young people and women's services at the Southern Trust, said he would like to "sincerely apologise to women and families that are impacted from the inconvenience of having to change their birthing plans or indeed have their babies in a facility that wouldn't be their number one choice".

He said it was important to emphasise that the "number one priority" is patient safety.

Over the last number of years, McCafferty said the trust had "experienced increasing challenges to recruit consultant cover to the Daisy Hill site" in order to sustain the minimum level of consultant cover required to run maternity services at both hospitals.

"That has become particularly difficult over the last number of months with a number of retirements and two consultants taking up post in other trusts in Northern Ireland and our inability to recruit replacements," he said.

The BBC understands that Daisy Hill Hospital's maternity unit has become reliant on locum and temporary staff.

While efforts are continuing to obtain the required level of consultant cover to maintain services, McCafferty said "the trust has to plan on the basis that we will have to temporarily consolidate services on the Craigavon site from the end of October into November".

He said the trust will engage with women through its community-based midwifery service in terms of agreeing birthing plans, ensuring that any challenges are planned for, whether that is transport or anxiety around having to go to a different hospital.

"I think women have absolutely the right of choice, but we can only provide that choice where we believe it's safe to do," he said.

The Southern Trust said its medical workforce pressures reflect a wider shortage of consultant obstetricians across Northern Ireland and the UK.

"We have exhausted all relevant agencies across Ireland, across the UK and over the past six weeks throughout Europe.

"Unfortunately, we have not been able to attract the required skill set or people with relevant qualifications and that's the challenge that we continue to experience," said McCafferty.

Dr Beverley Adams, the divisional Medical Director for Integrated Maternity and Women's Health at the trust, said affected women will be informed about the possible need to move the birthing part of their journey as they prioritise "safe patient care".

She said that while having a baby is "a normal life event", it can develop into "a complicated life event very quickly".

"We can't always screen for those complications and see them coming, so we need to be assured that should those complications arise, there's rapid access to an adequately skilled senior population of clinicians who can deal with that appropriately, quickly and safely," she said.

Adams said she understood that travel time would be a factor for more women, but the trust had dealt with that before and they have systems in place that "can deal with that safely again".

She said the trust is working through a staff engagement process at the minute, both medically and within midwifery, nursing, and other professions but there will not be any job losses.

"We need to find a system that means that's a sustainable, safe solution over the coming months," she added.

The loss, or potential loss, of any service from any of our hospitals in Northern Ireland is always a contentious issue.

You just have to look at recent wranglings over emergency general surgery within the Northern Trust.

And it's an argument the Southern Trust will remember well as the Department of Health (DoH) permanently removed emergency general surgery from Daisy Hill in January 2024.

The potential loss of its maternity services will undoubtably raise tensions further, both politically and among the community.

While the department is very clear that this is not a done deal and the health minister is appealing to the rest of Northern Ireland to help, it is hard to see where that help will come from.

This is a workforce planning issue, which is the responsibility of the department, and the Southern Trust has been trying, and failing, to retain and recruit consultants for months.

Those who use Daisy Hill will be acutely aware that, in July 2023, maternity services were permanently suspended at Causeway Hospital and consolidated at Antrim Area Hospital and may fear that the Southern Trust will follow suit.

But not if the new health minister can help it.

Anyone who is concerned should contact their midwife first or call the dedicated maternity information line on 028 3756 1325 which will be open between 14:00 BST and 17:00 on Monday to Friday.