Infant bereavement photography

PURPOSE: Neonatal palliative care guidelines increasingly recommend that parents be encouraged to provide care for their dying baby and to spend time with the before and after death. However, little is currently known about how parents perceive such memory-making interventions. This study explored the significance of memory-making for bereaved parents and the impact of memory-making on parents' experience of neonatal end-of-life care. DESIGN AND METHODS: We conducted extended interviews with 18 parents who had experienced neonatal loss...

Perinatal loss, including fetal and infant death, is a devastating experience for parents, resulting in long-term adverse physical and psychosocial outcomes. However, little is known about what services might best support grieving parents. We aimed to understand the role of professional bereavement photography in assisting the grieving process of parents who have lost a fetus or infant, by examining the perspectives of bereaved parents, professional photographers, and health care professionals. Twenty semistructured interviews were conducted, and interview transcripts were analyzed using modified grounded theory...

BACKGROUND: Parents who experience a perinatal loss often leave the hospital with empty arms and no tangible mementos to validate the parenting experience. Opportunities to create parenting experiences with transitional objects exist following the infant's death. PURPOSE: This article offers suggestions for staff in units where infant loss is possible to best assist parents in optimal grieving through the offering of transitional bereavement objects. METHODS/SEARCH STRATEGY: CINAHL Complete, MEDLINE, and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews were searched using the following key words-perinatal bereavement, grief, perinatal loss, transitional objects, bereavement photography-and the search was limited to 5 years and the English language...

The provision of bereavement care is an important part of neonatal intensive care. This systematic review of the effectiveness of interventions to support families and facilitate emotional adjustment following the death of a baby suggests that, while these are largely appreciated by parents who have participated in research, there has been little rigorous evaluation of their effectiveness. This review reflects on possible reasons for this; for example: NICU-led bereavement care is changing, the effectiveness of bereavement care is difficult to measure, concepts of effectiveness are not static, and ethical concerns complicate experimental research...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

OBJECTIVE: To systematically review parent experiences with hospital care after perinatal death. DATA SOURCES: An evaluation of more than 1,100 articles from 1966 to 2006 was performed to identify studies of fetal death in the second or third trimester and neonatal death in the first month of life. METHODS OF STUDY SELECTION: Studies were limited to those that were in English, evaluated care in U.S. hospitals, and contained direct parent data or opinions...

The death of a newborn infant is an extremely emotional event for relatives. Many hospitals provide the parents with support, and in some cases a mourning protocol is available. Some hospitals offer parents photographs of infants which have died around birth. The photographs are often taken by a nurse or doctor on the maternity or paediatric ward. It is advisable to draw up a mourning protocol which allows professional studio photographs to be taken. As a photograph is often the only concrete memento that parents have of their baby, it is important for it to be of good quality...

OBJECTIVE: To examine the place of recent and historical pictorial representations of the dead baby and their relevance to the current care of grieving parents. DESIGN: A selective review of the literature on representations of the dead baby. Visual examination of seven paintings (1550-1676) in order to understand their meaning. FINDINGS: In the late 20th century the practice of taking photographs of the baby who had died became widely accepted...

This article describes one nurse's experience resulting from her interest in the value of giving bereavement photographs to parents who experience a perinatal loss. Three families were interviewed about the meaning of those photographs. The parents described deep feelings of the importance of the photographs, which provided the parents with unquestionable proof of their baby's existence. The information discovered through these interviews provides a basic look at how visual memories of the infant can help in the healing process...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Although professionals can do little to cushion the emotional trauma for parents and family when an infant dies, many institutions have implemented bereavement programs to offer counseling, support, and assistance. Included in such programs are photographs of the deceased infant. The value of such photographs has been documented in the literature. Some institutions provide parents with instantly developed photos of the deceased infant. Unfortunately, instant prints may blue and often fade with time. To improve services to bereaved families at a hospital in Massachusetts, a program was implemented to use the skills of the hospital's professional biomedical photographers and the nursing team...