Mental health articles

With a premature birth or a medical problem identified at birth, the baby
becomes the focus of medical attention in an alien situation and the mother is often left in the labour ward as the partner accompanies the baby to the nursery.
This means that the parents are very vulnerable from the beginning. Ideally, the ospital addresses that vulnerability by providing emotional and social support
for the parents from the time of admission to the hospital and easy access to their
baby. In tertiary hospitals, where patients are often from ‘out of area’, a
particular effort is often made to identify families isolated from their normal
supports. However, hospitals vary in their recognition of the need for parents to bemotionally supported and given every opportunity to be involved in the care
of their baby.
Parents of premature or ill infants continue to require support from the time
of the birth or diagnosis through the early years of their infant’s life. Initially,
there is the trauma of the interrupted pregnancy or the early development of
intimacy between the mother and infant, the anxiety of whether or not the infant
will survive, and sometimes there is also anxiety about the mother’s well-being.
Once the premature or ill infant is stabilised, parents need to grieve the loss of
the pregnancy they did not have and the ideal birth experience with the perfect
baby. However, parents vary enormously in their response to the birth of their
baby and the timing of their need to grieve.
For many parents, in the early weeks of their baby’s life, these emotions are
put on hold, perhaps surfacing as the baby grows healthily, or in some cases not
until months later, during preparation for another baby.
Lengthy hospitalisation means that families have become known to nursing
staff, impressions are formed and assessments made. There are expectations
about visitations and behaviours; for example, visiting often enough not to be
labelled as neglectful parents, but not too often to become labelled as anxious,
intrusive parents. Fortunately, in recent years in many hospitals with the
introduction of a family-centred approach, nursing staff are being supported and thus can acknowledge their own emotional stress and can identify signs of
anxiety in the parents and be more empathic.