Dr Edward Gasiorowski is a Neonatal Consultant at St Mary’s Hospital, Manchester. He attended Child Bereavement UK’s Neonatal, Palliative and End of Life Care Conference

The point in coming to the conference was to try to find ways of using terminology and words. A way of using some kind of framework where I can bring most of the consultants on board and say, ‘You know what, we’ve all got our own personal way of doing things but, if we stick to a standard, we might actually find that, because we don’t conflict with each other in the way that we say things and the words that we use, it might make a difference to the way we deliver care in the future and the quality of the care we provide to parents'.

Dr Edward Gasiorowski

I have an interest in developing our service at St Mary’s in palliative and end of life care. We’ve got a lot of patients on our unit; we have about 1000 admissions a year and get about 40 to 50 deaths a year. I think that to find a way of standardising our approach to communicating with parents, breaking bad news and understanding the emotions and feelings that they go through, is vitally important.

We have nineteen consultants working on our neonatal unit and we all have different ideas and perceptions of how best to manage, not just end of life care, but palliative care and of communicating with parents to try to prevent conflict arising. 

The point in coming to the conference was to try to find ways of using terminology and words. A way of using some kind of framework where I can bring most of the consultants on board and say, ‘You know what, we’ve all got our own personal way of doing things but, if we stick to a standard, we might actually find that, because we don’t conflict with each other in the way that we say things and the words that we use, it might make a difference to the way we deliver care in the future and the quality of the care we provide to parents.


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