Sensitizing Bad News: Helping Parents Prepare for the Worst

The words “I have some bad news” are devastating to those who are excitedly anticipating an addition to their family.   Part of caring for families with a perinatal loss or unexpected bad news includes customizing care to allow for cultural and religious diversity and adapting the “standard of care” to the needs of each person or family.  Customizing the standard of care delivery of these words with families could be more personalized if the patients’ cultural and religious beliefs were assessed and considered.

A team of nurses with a special interest in bereavement believed there was an exceptional need to adapt the care of patients when communicating devastating news such as a perinatal loss and to individualize the care they received based on their cultural and religious needs.  We believe there really was a difference in offering highly specialized care in bereavement by imparting information to patients in a more culturally and religiously sensitive manner at one of the most difficult times in their lives.

A teaching tool for nurses in a busy tertiary labor and delivery was created with knowledge elicited from community and religious leaders to assist with the care of patients going through perinatal bereavement.  The purpose of this tool is to identify with whom communication should happen, which family members should be present and which health care professionals should speak with the family, thus offering concrete applications for use in clinical practice.

As our patient community continues to grow, we hope to be able to deliver devastating news to our families in a more culturally sensitive manner, taking belief systems into account as part of the standard of care for our bereavement patients in labor and delivery, thus Connecting the Heart and Science of Care.