Professional Development Projects

Royal College of Midwifery Learning Modules

We co-produced two ilearning modules with the Royal College of Midwifery (RCM), which were launched in January 2020. One focuses on ways of communicating choice of what to do with the baby’s body (and/or the pregnancy remains), and one focuses on ways of improving communication with parents when they are registering their baby’s death, helping midwives to explain and facilitate this process. The modules draw attention to the conflicting identities that people sometimes develop following pregnancy loss, the different ways in which people who have experienced pregnancy loss construe their experience through metaphor, their changing metaphorical relationships to time and the implications that these have for the care they require. https://www.rcm.org.uk/about-us/

Registrar Training Package

We co-produced an online training package with the General Register Office (GRO) and the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Charity (SANDS) for registrars on how to manage stillbirth registration and certification processes and how best to communicate with parents to promote best practice and equip registrars to provide support for, and to communicate more effectively with, bereaved parents.

FBCA Online Training Package

We co-produced an online training package in collaboration with the Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities (FBCA) which is available to members of the FBCA based across 236 crematoria. The training is intended to help funeral directors and crematorium technicians to understand the metonymic relationship that parents have with their baby through their attachment to the ashes and why it is important for parents of stillborn babies to have the ashes of their baby returned to them.