Perinatal Bereavement:  Helping To Heal in Our Muticultural Environment

We, as nurses, choose to view ourselves as healers; but many times, without meaning to, we do just the opposite when helping a mother who is experiencing a perinatal loss.  We may have thought that we were saying the right thing, or doing the right thing, and in the end, the only thing that we accomplished was making the mother or family feel worse.  So many of our mothers vary in their backgrounds, religions, cultures, and even their social practices, that it's hard to even begin to understand what each of our mothers' might choose to want after the loss of their baby.  It is only through understanding that each mother is an individual, with individual needs, wants, feelings and cares, that  we begin to truly understand how the healing process begins to take place.

Meeting the challenges of cultural diversity can be difficult; especially when I began thinking of combining cultural diversity with that of perinatal bereavement.  Providing excellent nursing care in this situation can be overwhelming, but this issue was something that our unit needed to address, and tackle head on.  After I recently completed a six month course in cultural diversity, and a training in perinatal bereavement counseling, it made me wonder how, if at all, I could combine the two trainings, to really benefit the unit where I am a clinical education specialist.  I wanted so much to begin a support group for our mothers who experience a perinatal loss, but after meeting with a group of our chaplains and social workers, I became discouraged after I was told that because our population was so diverse, that the majority of them probably would not attend my support group; for various reasons.

I, of course, plan to do another longitudinal study to hopefully prove this to be wrong, but in the mean time, I wanted to make sure that we do have something in place to assist our mothers that experience losses; mothers, who, unlike myself, are not Caucasian, middle class, and from a good home.  Realistically, most of our mothers who experience losses, are either African American, Hispanic, or from various other races and backgrounds.  We do have some that are Caucasian as well though.  My point is; our nurses need to be trained to provide excellent culturally competent care for every mother, from every walk of life, no matter her race, color, creed, or culture.  I have made it my mission, and have began working with our cultural diversity department to develop CD's and DVD's in several different languages, which will also address different cultures, and cultural beliefs, such as those of the Muslim faith, or the Jewish orthodox faith.  There are so many different cultures, and cultural beliefs that surround birth and death that it's difficult for us, as nurses, to even keep up sometimes.  This will not only help our mothers and their families, but it will also benefit our staff nurses as well.