The Universities of Manchester and Central Lancashire in collaboration with Sands, the stillbirth and neonatal death charity, are undertaking a survey of parents who have experienced a stillbirth. We have recently carried out a similar survey of over 3,000 midwives, obstetricians and pathologists which has identified various issues around the care of parents following a stillbirth. We are initially focusing on stillbirth as it's thought there are problems counselling parents about investigations to discover a cause for stillbirth. We hope in time to be able to study parents’ needs for counselling and support from professionals after neonatal death as well.
We need your views and experiences so that we can improve the medical and midwifery care given to parents after their child is stillborn. The reason for improving care is that appropriate investigations may reduce the risk of parents having another stillborn child and help us understand more about what causes stillbirth. Ultimately, we want all parents to have the best care possible. When the results of this research are presented we intend to use quotations from these questionnaires – these responses will be anonymised. This study has recieved ethical approval from the University of Manchester ethics committee (Ref 09392).
We acknowledge that perinatal death can raise emotional issues for all individuals concerned. Sands offers support to health care professionals as well as families; a helpline is available on 0207 436 5881 helpline@uk-sands.org for anyone affected by the death of a baby.
We expect that this questionnaire will take approximately 20-30 minutes to complete. If you have any queries, please contact me on alexander.heazell@manchester.ac.uk or 0161 701 6968 or Dr Alexander Heazell, Maternal and Fetal Health Research Group, 5th floor (Research), St Mary’s Hospital, Manchester, M13 9WL.
Thank you in advance for your help with this project,
