Posted 22 十月 2015

Last week Sands united with charities across the UK for the most successful Baby Loss Awareness Week yet.  Culminating on International Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day, Baby Loss Awareness Week takes place each year from 9-15 October. It is an opportunity for people to acknowledge and remember their precious babies. It is also a chance to raise awareness of the emotional impact of pregnancy and infant loss, and the scale of the tragedy, which affects up to one in five families in the UK.

To help achieve this and raise awareness of the issues surrounding baby loss, throughout the week we invited our supporters to share an experience of a time when someone said or did something that helped them after their baby had died. We received more than 90 experiences which were added to the Baby Loss Awareness website between 9-15 October. These touching and poignant stories are still available to read on the site.

Baby Loss Awareness Week culminated in Wave of Light at 7pm on 15 October, in which thousands of people lit candles as part of the international Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day in memory of their baby or babies who had died. This year we ran a digital #waveoflight with our partner charities where we invited people to share photos of their candles on social media. The response to this was so powerful that #waveoflight trended on Twitter, helping to raise further awareness of the issues surrounding baby loss. Our post about the Wave of Light on the Sands Facebook page reached over 10 million people, and we reached nearly 44,000 Twitter users too.

Baby Loss Awareness Week is a campaign led by Sands in collaboration with a number of other charities united in their support for families who experience the death of a baby, including Action on Pre-eclampsia, ARC (Antenatal Results and Choices), Bliss, Child Bereavement UK, The Ectopic Pregnancy Trust, Group B Strep Support, The Lullaby Trust, The Miscarriage Association, The Multiple Births Foundation, Petals, The Scottish Cot Death Trust, TAMBA (The Twins and Multiple Births Association), Together for Short Lives, and Tommy’s.

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