Preparing nurses and midwives to provide perinatal bereavement care: A systematic scoping review

Abstract

Objectives: To provide a comprehensive cross-sectional overview of published studies on perinatal bereavement care education programmes developed and tested with nurses and midwives.

Design: A scoping review following the Arksey and Malley's framework.

Data sources: Eight electronic databases were searched in December 2020 without restriction on language and publication date: PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Web of Science, Scopus and ProQuest.

Review methods: All identified studies were reviewed by two reviewers based on the article title and abstract screening. Full-text articles were assessed according to the inclusion criteria. Original studies that reported on perinatal bereavement care education for nursing and midwifery students or clinical nurses and midwives were included.

Results: Eighteen studies out of 817 articles were included. Perinatal bereavement care knowledge and skills, improvement in clinical skills in abortion care and psychological support for nurses and midwives are three core elements of the education content. Workshops and debriefing are the most frequently used formats. The duration mostly ranges from a half day to 3 days. Knowledge, confidence, satisfaction and relevant psychological variables such as posttraumatic stress symptoms are frequently used to evaluate the education programme's effectiveness. Most studies chose to use self-designed questionnaires as measurement tools. Nurses and midwives reported both positive experiences and improvement suggestions for perinatal bereavement care education programmes.

Conclusions: This scoping review highlights the benefits of implementing education programmes for preparing nurses and midwives for perinatal bereavement care in the context of universities and hospitals. Longitudinal randomized controlled trials or quasi-experiments could further investigate the effectiveness of a more enhanced perinatal bereavement care education programme with a longer intervention time using valid and reliable evaluation tools.

Keywords: Bereavement care; Education; Midwives; Nurses; Perinatal loss; Scoping review.