How our bereavement team offered support in new ways

Note: the image above is stock photography

Hayley is a specialist midwife at the Royal Berkshire Hospital. She looks after bereaved parents in the immediacy of their loss. She’s also responsible for the postnatal clinic together with obstetrician Jane. Here she shares the challenging emotions parents and staff were facing due to Covid-19 restrictions. 

Due to changes in visiting restrictions on our wards, parents were unable to come back to spend precious time with their babies. For all staff, this was an extremely challenging and emotional situation as we appreciate the importance of memory making following the loss of a baby. As a bereavement team, we were able to work around the restrictions and find alternative ways to facilitate this.

With a little help from others…

We initially made arrangements with our mortuary staff for parents to spend time with their babies there. Although this is not our usual practice, the time parents were able to spend with their baby made a difference. Unfortunately, this also became restricted as visitors to the hospital were reduced. We were very fortunate that we have an extremely positive working relationship with our local funeral directors. They were able to step in and offer parents the opportunity to visit their chapel of rest to spend time with their babies.

“We arranged for parents to spend a precious night at home, introducing their daughter to their family”

Another positive outcome from the visiting restrictions was that we were able to purchase two extra cuddle cots, with the help of a local charity, and develop a protocol where parents could take their baby home from the Delivery Suite. This meant that a family were able to spend a precious night at home, introducing their beautiful daughter to other members of their family.

When the clinic meetings could not happen

A challenge we faced at our postnatal clinic is the weekly meetups for bereaved parents. For over twenty years, we have a dedicated weekly clinic where parents are given 45-60 minutes to talk through memories of their last pregnancy, and raise any questions that have occurred to them as potential concerns, we review all test results and discuss a potential care pathway for a future pregnancy. At the beginning of the pandemic, when we could not bring couples in for a face-to-face encounter, we sent a detailed letter to them. This letter was copied to their GP, and came along with a support pack of our contact numbers and specialist email inboxes, plus leaflets for local peer and professional bereavement counselling (funded by our wonderful parent/peer support groups, The Willows) so that they could contact directly. Once we had the NHS video clinic software up and running, we switched to video appointments. These have been generally well-received as couples are not having to worry about childcare or Covid, and we can talk without anyone wearing a mask.