Lead Bereavement Midwife, Band 7
| Posting date: | 28 July 2025 |
|---|---|
| Salary: | £47,810.00 to £54,710.00 per year |
| Additional salary information: | £47810.00 - £54710.00 a year |
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 11 August 2025 |
| Location: | Gloucester, GL1 3NN |
| Company: | NHS Jobs |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | C9318-25-0707 |
Summary
- Offering emotional support and guidance to families -Implement the core principles of the National Bereavement Care Pathway - Support staff to ensure families receive appropriate care, memory making opportunities, and help with difficult decisions such as post mortem consent - Ensuring families are informed about care reviews/ incident investigations and feel empowered to contribute to the process - Facilitate early access to bereavement support in subsequent pregnancies and support families through future pregnancies ensuring consistency of compassionate care - Support staff to offer individualised support in collaboration with antenatal screening and fetal medicine teams when fetal abnormalities are detected - Provide a safe space for families to make informed decisions regarding their pregnancies - Lead family support initiatives including funeral arrangements - Support clinical debrief sessions for both staff and families, fostering an environment for reflection and emotional processing - Ensure that their own documentation is accurate and contemporaneous using paper and electronic systems and that patient confidentiality is maintained - Advising healthcare professionals on best practice in bereavement care and delivering training to improve sensitivity and understanding. - Knowing where to direct staff to for psychological support when they have been deeply affected by bereavement cases - Provide direct line management to the band 6 bereavement midwife and to the 4 bereavement champions who are core central delivery suite midwives - They will provide leadership to the midwifery clinical team in relation to bereaved women and help direct the team to the correct resources to ensure documentation and clinical care is optimal - Represent families at Perinatal Mortality Review Tool (PMRT) meetings - Provide input for monthly perinatal mortality reports within the patient quality and safety framework - Work closely with the perinatal quality and safety team and the lead obstetric consultant for bereavement to conduct systematic multidisciplinary reviews of stillbirths and neonatal deaths - Undertake Datix incident reviews and bereavement-related risk management - Support the Child Death Overview Panel (CDOP) process - Contribute to national reports analysing themes and trends in perinatal deaths to improve learning and care - Contribute to local learning, audits, policy development and quality improvement initiatives to uphold patient safety and high standards of care - Represent bereavement at maternity groups; intrapartum forum, senior midwifery lead meetings or similar - Develop and review staff and patient literature, ensuring alignment with national standards - Have continuing responsibility for arranging staff training in bereavement care. This will include an induction training package for new staff, organising and delivering multidisciplinary training - Monitor staff bereavement training compliance and encourage all those who consent for post-mortems to access the e-learning for health modules for this - Work closely with obstetric, midwifery and neonatal teams as well as external agencies such as the medical examiner, mortuary, chaplaincy, charities, laboratories, registrars, funeral directors and advocacy groups such as the Maternity and Neonatal Independent Senior Advocate (MNISA)