Identifying, Understanding, and Working with Grieving Parents in the NICU, Part II: Strategies

Abstract

Supporting parents in coping with stress and loss improves the health and development of their child. This article looks at the need for monitoring the health and well-being of parents of infants in the NICU, including practical matters for health care professionals providing follow-up care. It is important to increase public and professional awareness of the grief response. Practical suggestions for coping with the NICU experience, many of them from professionals who are also parents of NICU patients, are offered for grieving parents and family members.

Nurses' Knowledge, Attitudes/Beliefs, and Care Practices Concerning Do Not Resuscitate Status for Hospitalized Neonates

“…However, the underlying disease process would impact the infant's developmental progression over time, and the infant would not grow and develop as expected. The prognostic nature of DNR for neonates sometimes makes it difficult for families to interpret information and make decisions because they are facing loss of a perceived healthy child, who may outwardly appear quite normal to them (Baergen, 2006; Dyer, 2005). Parents presented with the potential loss of a newborn are dealing not only with the loss of that child as an infant, but also they are losing that child as a potential long‐term family member who they expected to grow and become an integral member of the family (Brinchmann & Vik, 2005; Dyer).…”

Does Educational Status Influence Parents’ Response to Bad News in the NICU?

“…The high reported helplessness of all parents deserves special attention, since helplessness can indicate that basic psychological human needs, as stated by Grawe, may not have been met [35,36]. This is problematic, because a low satisfaction of needs makes it difficult to cope well with challenging borderline situations (e.g., [57]) and to provide good, supportive care for one's own infant [9,58,59]. An infant's stay in a NICU in itself is often a highly stressful situation for parents [60,61], even without bad news about newly diagnosed diseases, and helplessness-based liminality [62] shapes parental NICU experiences anyway.…”