​2020.2.5 Community Collaboration Meeting

Interested in participating?

8:30-10:00am
SSM Health St Mary's Hospital
Cafeteria Dining Room A/B
700 South Park Street
Madison, WI

We invited parents, professionals, and nonprofits that serve and support the pregnancy and infant loss community in Dane county to come together to make connections and identify ways that we could work together to better support our community.
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Complete a contact form to share with attendees!

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2020 Community Collaboration Survey Question Results: What gaps do you see in local services to families preparing for and grieving the loss of a pregnancy or infant in our community? (This was an open ended question answered by 13 collaborators before attending the meeting.)
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The results were categorized into three groups:
Care From Providers

• Early loss support, Hospital ER’s not treating a loss as a loss when it comes to early pregnancy loss
• Early pregnancy loss could receive better in clinic (or hospital) support. 
• Unable to determine what grief support services are being offered in hospital ERs.
• No follow up post loss with a team of doctors to go over placental report, etc. 

• Same post-partum questionnaire delivered at postpartum follow-up, need more direct review/care post loss.
• Transition of hospital visit to funeral home.

Families of Color

• I think a gap is in reaching out to families of color. 
• Reaching low-income families, immigrants, families of color.
• There's definitely less bereavement support that is tailored toward communities of color--Black,Latin@/Indigenous, etc. 
• Racism and discrimination within systems. In the criminal justice system racism might look like CPS being called on a family of color but not on a White family, even if the situations are similar. There are so many stories in FIMR that illustrate how Black women are treated like criminals when their babies die. 
• Hospital and clinic systems seem to have a more paternalistic attitude towards families of color. For example, a doctor might work with a White mom to make birth control choices, but might be far more forceful and make birth control decisions for a mom of color, even as she's still in the hospital grieving her loss.
• Assuming what a family of color needs after a loss. 

Awareness of Bereavement Resources

• Not connecting families with support prior to loss (if poor outcome expected) in terms of others in similar situations.
• Communication about support group options
• Having personally been through two pregnancy losses, I felt alone and not sure who to turn to. I did find a support group, but it took me 9 months to finally feel brave enough to attend. 
• Loss is not something people speak of, until usually well after the fact. How to preemptively have open discussions so when it does happen, people know where to go to in our community.
• No resources under 50 miles
• Gap in who in the community can help.
• Letting families know what resources do exist in our community.
• How after you have lost a child you are forgotten about and have to deal with it alone.

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Meeting take away...

We have so much work to do in the community.

Each attendee was invited to introduce themselves and their organization, if applicable. We then went on to cover the responses from the above survey question. We had hoped to create start creating a survey to understand what parents need and want but throughout the conversation it quickly became clear that even those of us working and volunteering in this community have many questions that we need answered.  Many questions arose regarding the standards of care that families would receive at different providers and how to train staff. 

​The overwhelming response to this meeting was that attendees appreciated getting a chance to meet each other in person and that we need to find a way to work together to gain momentum in education and standards of care.