Baby Loss Awareness Week

Baby Loss Awareness Week starts on Monday (9 October). Delivered by the Baby Loss Awareness Week Alliance, the campaign aims to support bereaved parents and families and to unite them with others across the world to commemorate their babies’ lives and lost pregnancies.

It is a wonderful opportunity to bring those affected together as a community and reassure anyone touched by pregnancy and baby loss that they are not alone.

Here at CHUMS, our Baby Loss Bereavement Service has been running for 11 years, supporting bereaved parents and families – and some bereaved grandparents – who have experienced the devastation of losing their child.

The Baby Loss Service offers bereaved parents and families assessment appointments, telephone support, individual and couple’s sessions, monthly Snowdrop support groups and a closed Snowdrop Facebook group.

We support bereaved parents and families following the death of their baby due to late miscarriage (18 weeks onwards), compassionate termination, stillbirth, and neonatal death. Support in subsequent anxious rainbow pregnancies can be provided, both through individual and couple’s sessions, monthly Rainbow groups and a closed Rainbow Facebook group.

Our offer also includes support to couples facing palliative diagnosis for their baby, through a mixture of face to face, telephone and virtual sessions, and we run a monthly Sunrise and Sunset group for bereaved parents who have experienced the death of a baby from a twin or triplet pregnancy, where they also have a surviving baby.

We have also recently started running a monthly Fathers Group.

In addition, we hold 2 event days each year in collaboration with Luton and Dunstable Hospital; a Summer Memory day and a Snowdrop Remembrance Service in December.

All of these services ensure we are offering understanding, advice, guidance, compassion, bereavement support and counselling; both immediately when it is most needed, and in the time ahead.

In 2021, there were 2,866 stillbirths in the UK, and an estimated 1 in 5 pregnancies end in miscarriage, based on those that are reported.

Over the coming week, we will be sharing stories and further examples of our work, and ways in which those who need to can access support.