Nurse Sue Steen at Maple Grove Hospital is a perinatal nurse navigator who coordinates and advocates high-quality care for families experiencing a devastating perinatal loss. For the past ten years, perinatal losses have been Steen’s nursing area of focus. Her many years of experience working with these families coupled with her published research and writing on bereavement care informs and inspires her in the quest to provide families with the best care possible.
The perinatal nurse navigator role is a relatively new one at the hospital, created in the fall of 2012. The title of navigator accurately reflects the work: They help patients navigate the healthcare system. There are two nurse navigators at the hospital, Steen and her colleague, Tanya Thomas, who manage and coordinate care for high risk obstetric patients and their babies. Acting as a guide, the nurse navigators serve as a consistent contact to patients and families with hopes of promoting a personal, positive experience.
They also assist in continuing program development. Steen developed the hospital’s perinatal loss program in early 2013. The program, called the perinatal bereavement program, works with perinatal losses at all points along the continuum. These losses include early miscarriage, full-term or shortly after birth.
The perinatal bereavement program is comprehensive. “If we identify a family who has experienced a loss, we begin to walk beside them from whatever point of contact that is,” Steen says. After she learns of a family who has had a miscarriage, she follows up with phone calls and cards, offering support and resources. Every spring, the program holds an annual memorial service for families, led by Maple Grove Hospital chaplain Joel Jueckstock. Steen and Jueckstock also lead monthly sessions for parents who have experienced a loss. These support groups connect families who are weeks, months and even years removed from the loss of their children.
Part of the program’s success in providing total care coverage is the training and education. Steen has done extensive education with all staff in the birth center, including labor and delivery nurses and new hires, but Steen highlights a smaller group as part of the bereavement team. These highly skilled and compassionate nurses self-select into this team; they are the nurses who especially love to do the work and who attend workshops.
In addition to quality and informed care, the program offers families support in other ways. “We put together a box of keepsakes,” Steen says. “It can be a very important thing for them.” Families can take home a memory book with photos and footprints of the baby or a baby charm, which includes the baby’s birthstone. If the family has siblings, there’s a floor nurse who makes clay pots that include a handprint of the child and a handprint of the sibling. There are volunteers who make teddy bears for moms to carry out with them as they leave the hospital; the teddy bears are weighted to simulate the size of a baby. The Knitting Grandmas group creates blankets and baby hats for families to take home.
Steen says they give these keepsakes and mementos to families, but only if they want them. Every family grieves differently and the bereavement program is sensitive to this. “We always have to be real careful to make sure we are ascertaining what’s important to this family,” Steen says.
The perinatal bereavement program offers support to hundreds of families throughout their grieving process. One of those families is husband and wife Patrick and Courtney Coleman, who experienced the loss of their daughter, Anne. Following Anne’s diagnosis, Steen was the family’s first of what would become their growing support network. “Anne is and always will be part of our family,” Courtney Coleman says. “Sometimes it seems hard for the rest of the world to appreciate that but that is precisely what makes the program so special—being in an environment and surrounded by people who want to support and talk about your baby.” Coleman says that the program taught them that grieving is cyclical and that they are not alone.
Many involved in the program have become like family to the Colemans, who recently gave birth to their second daughter, a healthy girl named Lucy, at Maple Grove Hospital with the same team of doctors and nurses. “It is a great testament to those people and the perinatal bereavement program that there was nowhere else we would have rather been,” Coleman says. “Patrick and I are blessed and forever grateful for all that they have done for us, our son Jack, our daughter Lucy, and especially our angel, Anne.”
