The Nursing Staff: Experiences in Running a Staff Group

Involvement with the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit arose out of a tradition of good liaison between the Department of Paediatrics and that of Child Psychiatry. Some five years ago requests were received to see parents of babies on the Unit.

Regionalisation of neonatal care had resulted in the transfer of many critically sick infants long distances to neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). As a result, parents were frequently miles away from their baby in the first 72 hours after birth when the mortality of these critically ill newborns is especially high. These parents often presented particular difficulties in relating to their infants and were often those bereaved before any contact had been established. Under these circumstances, there was a growing awareness that although the provision of emotional support for families was important and ideally should be part of the routine paediatric care of the newborn, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the nursing and medical staff to provide this. This was particularly so in cases where staff believed parents to be exhibiting “pathological” behaviour. They began to feel that more specialised work with some parents would be appropriate.

The request, however, also revealed some awareness of stress and anxiety on the part of the staff and led us to consider what might be the aim of liaison work with the NICU and how might this be achieved.*

Theoretically, we envisaged that we would offer a group to the nursing staff based on the work of Caplan (1970) as described in his characteristics of mental health consultation.

However, it soon became apparent that certain principles for therapeutic liaison work needed some adaptation to the special setting of Neonatal