Infant Loss Online Course(s) & Continuing Education
Access the latest clinical skills and research for Infant Loss for PREGNANCY, LABOUR & CHILDBIRTH professional training. These Infant Loss online courses provide practice-changing skills and valuable perspectives from leading global experts. This Infant Loss education has been accredited for a variety of CEUs / CERPs and can be accessed on-demand, at your own pace.
Denise Love is a dynamic international speaker and educator.
She is passionate about life and compelled to support women through their many transitions in life. With an ever developing interest in life and death, she walks the path with many around death, particularly women whose babies die, either in utero, at birth, or soon thereafter.
With a Masters degree in nursing, living and working in remote villages in Asian countries as well as Australia, she is determined that women and babies be treated respectfully within their cultural expectations.
As a childbirth educator and an instigator of the introduction and training of doulas in Australia 20 years ago, Denise identified the vital need for birthing women to ""find their voice"" and trust their ancient internal ability to birth their babies. This recognition was stimulated by the developed world's highly structured interventionist and medicalised birthing paradigms and seemingly inflexible protocols and practices. Birth matters and so does the way we all die. Combining direct language, ritual and acknowledgement of grief when a baby dies, Denise brings a refreshing attitude and approach.
In her early years, practising as a Registered Nurse in remote indigenous communities, Denise gained valuable insight into how to trust our innate ability to birth, live fully and die. Denise's view has since been further reinforced through her work with vulnerable marginalised villagers in developing countries, where death is accepted as just a normal part of living.
Death is an extraordinary “thing” in our society. Since the invention of modern medicine, death has become the enemy, the unexcepted, the unacceptable, something to fight against, and a failure. Notwithstanding the fact that death is the only known certainty in life, we are shocked and overly distressed about it. There seems to be a hierarchy in death, that children shouldn’t die. It isn’t too many years ago that a mother expected with her large family that she would “lose” 2-3 children. That is still my experience in developing countries. I bring with me balance of modern medicine working together with educated mothers, and traditional expectations and practices, to try and find that balance in our work.
I will be discussing a baby as meaning from the moment of conception through to first year of life. We will explore the concept that as health professionals how our own thoughts, feelings, fears and beliefs influence how we respond to a mother and her family. The behaviours and expectations of the people around her influence her grief path, therefore we need to be clear and conscious in our communication. Examine rituals and behaviours that can alleviate some of her devastation, relief or pain.
Heartbroken: Loss and Grief in the Perinatal Time Period
Cynthia Good, MS Clinical Psychology, is an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, Clinical Counselor, author, consultant, and internationally recognized speaker. She is the Director of LifeCircle Consulting, LLC and is Certified in Acute Traumatic Stress Management. She is based in the Seattle, Washington, USA area, where she formerly served as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Midwifery at Bastyr University where she taught counseling skills and is a therapist at Sandbox Therapy Group where she works with children, adults, and families. Cynthia has a strong interest in the emerging field of lactational psychology. She brings the evidence and insights of psychology and lactation consulting to her presentations, providing information and teaching skills that are essential to understanding and effectively responding to the complex psychosocial realities of families living in diverse contexts. The focus of her presentations includes communication skills and counseling techniques for perinatal care providers; equity, diversity, and inclusion; infant feeding rhetoric; perinatal mental health; perinatal loss, grief, and trauma; ethics; serving as an expert witness in lactation-related court cases; cultural competence and humility; vitamin D; and more.
Topic: Cultural Competence or Cultural Humility? A Roadmap for Lactation Specialists - [View Abstract]
Topic: Heartbroken: Loss and Grief in the Perinatal Time Period - [View Abstract]
Topic: It Wasn’t Supposed to be Like This: Traumatic Birth, Traumatic Stress, and Breastfeeding - [View Abstract]
Topic: My Brain is Doing What? Bias, Ethics, and the Lactation Specialist - [View Abstract]
Topic: Perinatal Mental Health Screening: A Primer for Lactation Specialists - [View Abstract]
Topic: The IBCLC as Expert Witness: Role, Strategies, and Resources - [View Abstract]
Topic: The Rug Pulled Out from Underneath Me: Depression During Pregnancy and After Birth - [View Abstract]
Topic: Unpacking the Invisible Diaper Bag of White Privilege: An Overview of Racial Inequities in Breastfeeding Support - [View Abstract]
Topic: We’re Human, Too: Hidden Dynamics in Our Communication with Clients - [View Abstract]
A variety of losses and types of grief are common in the perinatal time period. Some of these losses are specifically related to the reproductive and perinatal experience and some just happen to occur during pregnancy or after birth. Perinatal care providers who understand the diverse experience of loss and grief are better able to provide compassionate and effective care for the families they seek to serve. This presentation provides an overview of loss and grief, including the difference between bereavement, grief, and mourning; ambiguous loss; disenfranchised grief; prolonged grief; chronic sorrow; and depression. It also describes skills—such as companioning, screening, and referral—that are part of providing grief-sensitive care to expectant and new parents who are coping with loss and grief.
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Lactation Choices Following Pre-and-perinatal Loss
Kathy Parkes is a sought-after speaker and webinar presenter as well as a published author. She has lived all over the world, settling in San Antonio, Texas after her Air Force husband retired. Kathy is a Registered Nurse with a Masters in Nursing Education and received her International Board Certified Lactation Consultant designation in 1992. Her private practice, Breastfeeding Perspectives, adds to her over 30 years of lactation experiences, which include WIC staff and clients, in-patient hospital work on L&D, postpartum, and NICU, taking a hospital to Baby-Friendly designation, setting up a lactation visitation program for both a home health agency and for the largest birth doula organization in San Antonio, and providing home and office lactation visits for private clients. She specializes in tethered oral tissues (tongue-and-lip ties), milk supply problems, multiples, and preterm/late preterm infants.
On the fun side, Kathy met her husband of 47 years as she was jumping out of the airplane he was flying. (You could say she fell for him!) She loves animals, traveling, and gardening. Most of all, she loves teaching others about breastfeeding.
Topic: How to Start a Private Lactation Practice - [View Abstract]
Topic: I QUIT!! Burnout, compassion fatigue, and self-care for the healthcare professional - [View Abstract]
Topic: Lactation Choices Following Pre-and-perinatal Loss - [View Abstract]
Topic: Powerful Relationships: How Babies (and Parents) Learn To Love - [View Abstract]
Professionals working with new mothers and infants are drawn to the field by compassion. However, when a loss occurs, whether prenatally or following birth, many of us are unprepared to deal with the loss ourselves, or in assisting the family. One of the many decisions that needs to be made in this time of grief is how the mother will deal with lactogenesis II, the surge of breast milk at two to four days. This session will provide an overview of anatomy and physiology of milk production, and discuss various choices the mother can make regarding how she will deal with the milk supply that occurs. To close the session, the speaker will briefly discuss self-care for professionals to aid recovery from such a loss.
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Supporting Parents Through Grief After the Loss of the Breast/Chestfeeding Relationship
Laurie-Anne Muldoon has supported families both as an RN and as a Social Worker in a variety of hospital, public health and community mental health settings in the U.S. and Canada for the last 25 years. She has felt privileged to have companioned many women, families and groups through their experiences of loss, upheaval and life transitions. Her passion for perinatal mental health was reignited following her own birthing and breastfeeding experiences with her son 11 years ago. Laurie-Anne brings her compassion and respect for human dignity to her work with parents transitioning into the world of parenthood. She is founder of The Ottawa Integrative Mental Health Collective. A proud Franco-Ontarian, Laurie-Anne was born and raised in Ottawa Ontario. She currently works in private practice specializing in perinatal mental health, birth trauma and loss.
For many mothers/lactating parents, their reasons for deciding to breast/chestfeed are often grounded in an effort to do what’s best for themselves and their child. Unfortunately, the reality is that on the road to trying to be the best parent they can be, breast/chestfeeding doesn’t always work out in the way that parents had hoped. In fact, sometimes it doesn’t work out at all. This loss can be deeply felt by a parent for a long time.
This presentation will explore what is at the heart of breast/chestfeeding grief and what distinguishes it from other types of grief. Lactation providers will also learn about several socio-cultural factors that amplify grief after the loss of the breast/chestfeeding relationship. Additionally, attendees will learn about some of the emerging data related to how the pandemic has impacted this type of grief. And lastly, we will take a closer look at how to respond more effectively to clients who are experiencing the loss of a breast/chestfeeding relationship with their child.
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When a Baby Dies: Providing Care and Support
Dr Vicki Culling is the Director and principal trainer for Vicki Culling Associates. Vicki is a bereaved parent and has been actively involved in Sands (an organisation that supports families when a baby or child dies) for over fifteen years. The stillbirth of her first daughter led her to utilise her skills, in supporting bereaved parents and families and educating health professionals with in-person workshops and online learning. Vicki was a founding member of the NZ national Perinatal and Maternal Mortality Review Committee (PMMRC) set up in 2005 and charged with collecting data on perinatal and maternal mortality and morbidity in NZ. Vicki is a current member of the NZ Ministry of Health’s Maternal Fetal Medicine Governance Board and vice-Chair of the National Perinatal Pathology Clinical Governance Committee. She also works as a lay reviewer for the Medical Council of NZ and the Dental Council of NZ. She lives in Wellington with her husband Kevan and daughter Phoebe.
In this presentation, we will explore grief and baby loss from a first-world, Western perspective. We will reflect on how our attitudes to grief have formed and look at the differences between traditional and contemporary approaches to grief and the tension that lies between them. We will also discuss some of the different ways that baby loss is discussed societally – looking particularly at platitudes, euphemisms and the tendency to minimize a baby’s death. We’ll finish with an exploration of our own approach to supporting bereaved families - our philosophy of care. At the end of this presentation, participants will have an array of concepts to help reflect on the care they give to parents and families who have experienced the tragedy of neonatal death.
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