Butterfly project - staff resources
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We are keen to make our resources freely available across all health care settings and are keen receiving feedback from units/hospitals that use them. The project aims are to improve the parental experience by better educating staff and families, providing training resources for staff, and links/resources for parents. These have been developed after an extensive period of qualitative research with parents and staff.
We are aware that other groups are now promoting the use of the Butterfly logo – that is fantastic - we are happy to collaborate with a many groups as we can to get the message out there, but would want to emphasise the importance of individualising care and the importance of understanding the area – this project is ‘more’ than a simple Butterfly logo. |
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Although parents were very positive about the medical care their baby had received, our research identified a number of recurring themes especially from parents about their experience with healthcare professionals with examples of positive and negative behaviors, actions and words. To develop the resources, we focused on eight key themes although it is important to highlight this was not a comprehensive list of all the issues that were identified. Details of these themes are available in our publications and the freely available resources. At present we have 4 types of resources that are available
1. Guideline – this summarizes practical advice for staff in providing parents with support before, during and after delivery and the positive behaviors and actions that can be adopted. Whilst it provides summary ‘guidance’ it is not prescriptive and emphasizes the importance of recognizing that every parent and family will have differing experiences. Care, support and education needs individualizing. There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to this complex phenomenon. We have a version of the guideline in Spanish and are keen to hear from groups interested in other translations. |
2. Teaching slides – a series of PowerPoint slides with quotes from parents and staff that exemplify the key themes. We anticipate this could be used by specific individuals to facilitate a 20-30 minute staff education and skill update sessions within hospital departments.
3. Leaflet – a very brief summary of the eight key themes that could be given out at a teaching update session for staff to retain. 4. Butterfly cot cards – these are professionally produced and we can send copies out to units. We have arranged with a local printing firm to produce these at cost price (<£25 for 100 cards including postage) so that hospitals who want a larger stock can order them from our website. Our own practice is to ask parents if they would like to write the name of the twin/babies who died on the card itself - all the parents we asked wanted to do this, but some may not. Indeed, some parents may not even want their surviving baby to be identified in this way, emphasizing the importance of staff education and understanding, and listening to the parents themselves. |