NICOLA Sturgeon has pledged to help the parents of premature babies with the cost of constantly travelling to and from hospital to be with their child.

The First Minister said she was “hugely sympathetic” to the idea, after it was raised by Labour MSP Mark Griffin, whose daughter Rosa was born 12 weeks early.

Mr Griffin said he and his wife were told their daughter would die due to very premature Labour, but six months after not being given a chance she was “doing well at home”.

At FMQs, he said: “The months we spent with Rosa in hospital were the most stressful time that we've ever gone through, and we're not alone in that. But other families don't have an MSP’s salary to cover the costs associated with that hospital stay - the transport, accommodation, food and childcare that on average costs £200 a week.

"Mothers we spoke to, already struggling with the stress of having a very premature, sick baby, having to leave that baby in hospital every night, were also worrying about how they were going to pay for a taxi to get to hospital the next day and sometimes they just couldn't."

The Central Scotland MSP asked Ms Sturgeon to look "as a matter of urgency" at financial support for parents in such a situation.

The First Minister said a range of support was already available, but accepted it was “not as consistent or necessarily as reliable as it needs to be".

Inviting Mr Griffin to work with Health Secretary Shona Robison to address the problem, she said: “There needs to be a situation in which it does not matter what part of the country a family is in and in which, if parents are in the position that Mark Griffin outlined, there is the basic support necessary to allow them to care for their child.”