The Institute is pleased to participate in and support National Grief Awareness Week (#NGAW20) which runs 2-8 December 2020.

Many of us have been affected by loss of a loved one this year and will recognise the importance of the key messages being shared during this awareness week. Isolation and social distancing makes grief so much more complicated but it shouldn’t limit the support being offered. Health visitors have the skills to help parents they work with to navigate their loss and can be a really important part of the support system if they put themselves in the right place at the right time. It can be difficult to find the right words, but we are offering the following to inspire confidence for practitioners.

Good Practice Points

During #NGAW20 we will be publishing a suite of five new Good Practice Points (GPPs) on different perspectives of grief and loss to support health visitor practice in this area, including:

  • Care following pregnancy loss or death of an unborn baby
  • Care following death of a baby (including stillbirth and SUDI)
  • Care following death of an infant/child (1-4years)
  • Supporting parents whose parent (or early attachment figure) dies
  • Supporting parents when their partner dies

These new GPPs will join our current revised GPP – When a parent dies

GPPs are available to our members and will be published on our website throughout this week – so look out for them!

 

Voices blog

We will also post a new Voices blog from Marc Harder – Sands, National Bereavement Care Pathway Project Lead this week – coming soon!

 

National Bereavement Care Pathway

If you haven’t visited the National Bereavement Care Pathway information yet please do. It is a pathway to improve the bereavement care offered to parents in England  following pregnancy or baby loss. There is a wealth of helpful resources and information within the pathways developed, and more than 50% of maternity provider organisations have signed up to adopt the pathways and bereavement standards in practice to date. It is a massive achievement by the team and does mean that a huge proportion of you will be working alongside midwifery colleagues working to those standards with parents in their/your care.

 

e-learning

Make the most of the fantastic e-learning modules hosted on the e-Learning For Health (eLfH) platform. The two modules include:

  • Bereavement Care after Pregnancy Loss or Baby Death – Learning for All: this has been designed to provide support when talking to bereaved individuals. They offer suggestions and guidance about what to say and do and are suitable for anyone who might come into contact, in their work or home life, with a person bereaved through pregnancy loss or baby death.
  • Bereavement Care after Pregnancy Loss or Baby Death – Healthcare Professionals: this course is for healthcare professionals caring for newly bereaved individuals. Working through the themes of the National Bereavement Care Pathway, the course helps healthcare professionals understand the important elements of excellent bereavement care

The Good Grief Trust

Go to The Good Grief Trust website for a range of information for families and professionals relating to all aspects of grief. It really is a one stop shop. Good Grief Trust cards entitled “Help and Hope in one place” are available to all practitioners so you have these to offer families as needed. CEO Linda Magistris is keen to get these to health visitors.

Finally, keep an eye out for the national events taking place this week coordinated by The Good Grief Trust as part of the national awareness week. See programme at: http://nationalgriefawarenessweek.org/events/?event-year=2020

  • We draw your attention to Monday 7 December, which is a Bereaved Parents day and will focus on baby loss and child loss (at any age).
  • The week will finish on Tuesday 8 December with an evensong at St Paul’s Cathedral – London, an informal minute’s silence at 5pm and UK-wide buildings (including St Paul’s) being lit up in yellow from 6pm to commemorate all those lost this year.

And finally

Please keep safe and well this National Grief Awareness week. We are seeking to support the campaign to normalise grief and help people to talk about loss. Remember the resources are there for you too, should you need them.

 

The quality of care that bereaved families receive when their baby dies can have long-lasting effects. Good seamless care between services can help support parents through this time; conversely poor care can make the situation much harder for families.

iHV was proud to work alongside key partner charities and professional bodies on this project, which has been supported by the Department of Health and the All Party Parliamentary Group on Baby Loss, and led by SANDS. Antoinette Sandbach MP highlighted the outcome of evaluation of an extended two phase pilot at Prime Minister’s Questions and, in response, Theresa May has urged all Trusts to adopt the pathway work into practice.

For more information: https://nbcpathway.org.uk

There are pathways covering 5 areas of loss to underpin high quality, individualised and sensitive care for:

  • Miscarriage
  • Termination of Pregnancy for Foetal Anomaly
  • Stillbirth
  • Neonatal Death
  • Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy – up to 12 months

Actions for health visitors:

  1. Review the pathways and consider the health visiting contribution to supporting families with pregnancy or baby loss
  2. Share the pathways with your Professional Lead and ask how your organisation will be taking the pathways forward in practice – direct them to: https://nbcpathway.org.uk/professionals
  3. Connect with your Community Midwives and ensure they are aware of the pathways too
  4. Find out more about which local maternity hospitals are adopters of the pathway via your local Maternity Voices or Maternity Transformation meetings in your region

The NBC pathway has been shown to help strengthen support to the bereaved families in pilot areas. There is now a rallying call and all health visiting services, like their maternity services partners, must be aware of and adopt these standards for the benefit of families in their care.

9 – 15 October, Baby Loss Awareness Week #BLAW2018, sees the publication of a significant piece of national collaborative work to develop a National Bereavement Care Pathway (NBCP).

Statistics for #babyloss tell us that around 15 babies died before, during or soon after birth every day in the UK in 2015. Of those, 9 babies a day were stillborn1. Additionally, one in four women will experience a miscarriage in their lifetime and one in one hundred will endure recurrent miscarriages (more than 3 in a row)2. Many of these women and their partners will go on to have a successful pregnancy and others may already be parents. Therefore, as health visitors we will already be working alongside many families affected by baby loss, and will contribute to the delivery of quality care to support new parents through a devastating time.

iHV has been honoured to be part of the National Bereavement Care Pathway (NBCP) work for England over the past year, meeting alongside 13 or more different national charities and professional bodies (Bliss, Lullaby Trust, RCM, RCN, etc) on the project led by Marc Harder for SANDS, with the support of the Department of Health and the All Party Parliamentary Group on Baby Loss. The aim for the project is to ensure that all bereaved parents are offered equal, high quality, individualised, safe and sensitive care in any experience of pregnancy or baby loss, be that miscarriage, termination of pregnancy for fetal anomaly, stillbirth, neonatal death, or sudden unexpected death in infancy (up to 12 months).

The NBCP Core Group has overseen the development of specific pathways to support each experience of loss described above, with the Training sub-group creating a training toolkit to support dissemination. There has been a Wave 1 pilot of the pathway in 32 sites from October 2017 and a further 21 sites in Wave 2, including one area of Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust that employs health visitors. Valuable feedback from hundreds of professionals and parents has fed into the project and shaped this vital work to ensure that it supports the delivery of consistently confident, parent-centred, empathic and safe care when a baby dies.

Go to: www.nbcpathway.org.uk to review the Sudden and Unexpected Death in Infancy (up to 12 months) pathway. See also: National Bereavement Care Pathway – standards.

The work is now heading towards national roll out and will bring huge benefits to parents and professionals alike. Please share this work amongst your health visiting colleagues and managers to discuss how the pathway and standards might be implemented in your area. Dissemination is key – help spread the message as widely as you can with all your multi-agency colleagues (GPs, Midwives etc) and check they are aware of the emergence of the national pathway.

Of note there is also work commencing in Scotland this month to bring the NBCP project to Scotland. Please contact [email protected] if you are an HV and would be interested in contributing to the Scotland project.

  1. https://www.sands.org.uk/about-sands/media-centre/blog/2017/06/every-96-minutes-baby-dies
  2.  https://www.tommys.org/our-organisation/charity-research/pregnancy-statistics/miscarriage accessed 27.9.18