Speaker: Nonkululeko Shibula
Facilitator: Rizka Ayu Setyani
As a bereaved parent, I bring a unique perspective to the essential connections midwives foster during perinatal loss. This presentation explores the intersection of family support systems, community networks, and cultural connections in bereavement care, highlighting how midwives can play a transformative role in these deeply personal and communal experiences.
This session aims to inspire midwives to recognize the power of connection in their work, ensuring that bereaved families receive compassionate, culturally sensitive, and comprehensive holistic support. By embracing these relationships, midwives can help shape healing narratives for families while fostering a more interconnected approach to care.
Drawing on lived experiences and collaborative initiatives, the session emphasizes the importance of integrating parent voice advocates into bereavement care. These advocates provide crucial insights that help midwives navigate cultural sensitivities, break taboos, and create environments of trust and healing.
Through personal stories and case studies, we demonstrate how midwives, alongside parents and communities, can foster meaningful connections that promote emotional, spiritual, and cultural understanding. Initiatives such as peer support programs and culturally sensitive frameworks offer pathways for midwives to build bridges between clinical care and the relational aspects of family and community.
Speaker: Kate Greenstock
Facilitator: Ally Anderson
Merely existing as a midwife in much of the world is a political act, flourishing collectively is our outrageous next step!
At its core, flourishing means staying connected to ourselves – and to each other – even as we face the psychological challenges of this work. Experiences of trauma exposure and moral injury connect us as global midwives despite our differing contexts. And yet they so often disconnect us from ourselves and the families we serve.
Our time together will acknowledge the realities AND explore how we go on sustaining ourselves in midwifery by proactively connecting to our purpose, our power, our body, our breath. Just as we ground and encourage a woman in labour, come be grounded and encouraged!
