16-05-2025
Bereavement care critical to midwife training
Rachel Mealey: Families and health professionals are calling for better training around stillbirths and bereavement care. For midwife students, their formal education on bereavement care could be just a single sentence or a mention in a lecture, prompting calls for more formal education and better training. Shannon Schubert reports.
Shannon Schubert: For parents like NSW woman Ellen Pinkstone, who gave birth to her stillborn son Sage in 2023, the loss of a baby is too often made worse by what happens next.
Ellen Pinkstone: We don't get that time back. We only get so much time with our babies. The hardest part of our son being stillborn isn't that he was stillborn, it's that we were treated so poorly that the bereavement care wasn't there.
Shannon Schubert: Staff at Port Macquarie Base Hospital told the grieving mother she could only spend 12 hours at a time with her son. They would then take him away inside a bag.
Ellen Pinkstone: A midwife passed our baby over to him in a black hand-held bag, literally just looks like a leather handbag. I asked her to get our baby. She said she would go get it from the morgue.
Shannon Schubert: Alan Pinkstone made a complaint to the NSW Healthcare Complaints Commission, which found staff should have been guided by the family on the amount of time spent with the baby. The hospital was directed to make improvements, including using a cot with wheels to transport stillborn babies. A spokesperson for the health service says they recognise there were shortcomings in the care. It says the hospital has apologised to the family and says it has implemented a range of strategies to improve bereavement care. But that's little comfort to Sage's mother.
Ellen Pinkstone: I feel like it was a nightmare and I feel like my baby shouldn't have been treated like that.
Shannon Schubert: In Australia, there are six stillbirths every day, a total of 3,000 perinatal losses a year. And while national accreditation standards stipulate midwife courses must include knowledge of stillbirth and bereavement care, Jasmine Kirk from the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Union says standards can be inconsistent.
Jasmine Kirk: At the moment they need to include something, but it is not clear how much that means.
Shannon Schubert: Midwife Blair Whitechurch is still traumatised by a birth she assisted as a student. Baby Rose was stillborn and Ms Whitechurch, a mature-age student, says she felt completely out of her depth.
Blair Whitechurch: I did all the wrong things, I vomited and fainted. And just emotionally felt absolutely terrorised for her. I felt so ill-equipped to support her.
Shannon Schubert: Eliza Strauss, a bereavement midwife with more than 20 years experience, says this doesn't surprise her.
Eliza Strauss: They assume that as midwives we get training around bereavement, grief and loss. However, that's really not the case.
Shannon Schubert: Six years ago, Ms Strauss established the Perinatal Loss Centre, supporting parents and midwives across the country with training courses she created. She argues most midwives can't remember what they learnt about perinatal loss at university and more thorough education is needed.
Eliza Strauss: It really needs to go to state and federal levels to try and get government involved to improve training and include bereavement training in workplaces as well as in universities.
Rachel Mealey: That's bereavement midwife Eliza Strauss ending that report by Shannon Schubert. A spokesperson for the Federal Department of Health says the government has invested $23.2 million over four years to increase support families and mandating training is a matter for state governments and universities. And if this story raises issues for you, help is available from PANDA on 1300 726 306.
