The toilets will be formed to communicate critical news of newborns
Health professionals more involved in the birth of babies will attend training workshops to better communicate to parents as difficult and critical news as your child has been born with a disability, with medical complications or who has suffered a perinatal death.
The first toilets that will receive it will be those of Madrid and the first hospital where they could be taught is Gregorio Marañón, according to Mónica Estacio, an emergency doctor, who was eight years ago the mother of a child with Down syndrome and who is one of the three patrons of the Unicap Foundation (Uniting Capacities), established a year ago and promoter of this initiative.
A project that has been baptized with the name of "Hilando Vidas", as explained in an interview with Efe Estacio, who received the news of the diagnosis of his son in an envelope whose contents he read when he left the geneticist's office.
"You are a doctor, you will not know how to read this document," the health worker told him when he handed it to him. The way she learned about her son's illness has marked her, and that is why she has been working since then to try to prevent this from happening to other people.
Next week, the three patrons of the foundation and the world of cooperation - the other two are her husband and a physiotherapist friend - will meet with representatives of the Ministry of Health of Madrid to accredit the training course and can begin to impart it to hospitals in the region.
It will be a five-hour workshop taught by actors, actresses and coaches who will teach the toilets "to listen to themselves, to understand their verbal and non-verbal language so they can learn how to express it in order to help and accompany families "When children arrive in situations of vulnerability or in cases of perinatal death.
"The family wants to feel," he says, "to communicate with empathy how the baby is, to know that they can rely on you and receive that warmth that we sometimes lack." There are things that can not be changed, such as being born with a genetic alteration. or a rare disease, but I can change the way I communicate the news to the family, the way to accompany and be with her, even with a silence. "
On how to communicate to the parents these 'critical news' - the moment, the form and the content - there is a lot of written theory, but with this initiative it is a matter of training the health workers live so that "they have tools, they have security in them and they can transfer this news to the family that is bad for both parties ".
"They will probably remember those moments as one of the most critical of their lives, they will not forget how they are communicated and we must take care of those words that may never be erased," he says.
In order to carry out the workshop, a consensus document has been drawn up in which seven entities have participated, such as the AEMI (Spanish Association of Infant Massage), the AEPP (Spanish Association of Perinatal Psychology) and Down Spain.
Also Feder (Federation of Rare Diseases), the Nene Foundation (Neurological Damage), Ihan Unicef (Initiative for the Humanization of Birth Assistance) and Semergen (Spanish Society of Primary Care Physicians).
Together they have prepared the documentation and the necessary material so that health professionals become aware and act appropriately in the face of the vulnerability that certain circumstances imply at the time of delivery.
The intention of the foundation is also to elaborate a protocol of action that is similar in all the hospitals in which the workshop will be taught in the future.
There is no generic protocol for action in this regard, according to this doctor, who is aware that there are many "good at communicating this news", but that "it can not be that they can inform you well or badly about how the delivery has gone depending on who is on duty or not. "
