We are delighted to welcome Dr Rajeshwari Myagerimath, Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist at Wirral University Hospital NHS Trust, to our regular National Bereavement Care Pathway Blog ahead of the project’s wave 2 launch. She tells us about the excellent progress staff have been making in implementing the NBCP over the past six months.

I’m so pleased that we have had the opportunity to work with Sands and its partners on the National Bereavement Care Pathway (NBCP) over the past few months.

Thousands of parents each year experience the devastation of their baby dying before, during or shortly after birth or within the first years of life; sadly this is true across the country and I see this in my own Trust here at Arrow Park in The Wirral.

The bereavement care received by parents varies hugely across the region and country and although we believe we provide consistently good bereavement care we are grateful that the NBCP has given us the opportunity to use new ideas and practices to improve the bereavement care we can offer.

Since the launch of the NBCP project in October 2017, our Trust has worked very hard to implement high quality patient centered standardised care across the Trust covering all aspects of pregnancy loss; early and mid-trimester pregnancy loss, termination of pregnancy due to congenital fetal anomalies, still births, neonatal deaths and sudden unexpected death of the infant.

All the staff involved in the care of bereaved parents and families feel confident in providing care under the NBCP guidelines. The five pathways are easy to follow and implement. Most of the Trusts have consolidated their pre-existing bereavement services since the implementation of NBCP and we are no different in that regard.

The response so far has been overwhelming and impressive. NBCP is ready to launch the second wave this month and we will be looking forward to supporting the wave 2 sites coming alongside us. It is a great pleasure to see more and more Trusts getting involved in this massive national project.

As part of this pilot project very soon bereaved families will be contacted for their feedback via a standardised survey. This will be an excellent opportunity for all the pilot sites to further improve on the care provided to these families and we continue to be committed to continuous improvement.