Improving the way healthcare professionals deliver news about a child having a condition associated with a learning disability

Background:

In the UK all eligible pregnant women are offered antenatal screening. Screening is useful for making informed decisions about further tests, delivery and treatment options if available. More congenital disorders are now identified during pregnancy due to increased sensitivity of tests. Parents may experience distress, fear, grief, depression, anxiety and chronic stress which can impact on their parenting and the development of the child (Aein & Delaram, 2014; Luz et al., 2017; RCN, 2013). Disclosing this news requires expert verbal and non-verbal communication skills (RCN, 2013).

The aims:

-To develop a training programme to improve the process of delivering different news to mothers-to-be and their families.

-To conduct an evaluation of the training intervention to assess acceptability, feasibility, and optimal design for future roll out of the intervention.

Preliminary Findings:

An absence of standardized training

-Training in DDN varied from mandatory communication courses to having no formal training.

-A lack of standardization and/or formal training has resulted in different news being delivered in multitude of ways.

-Association between the level of training and role of HCP (i.e. a consultant was likely to have undertaken mandatory relevant training). However, this had no bearing on ability to effectively DDN.