Bereaved Family Support Group

Stillbirths have remained a neglected issue invisible in policies and programmes, underfinanced and urgent need of attention . Partnership for Maternal Neonatal and Child Health (PMNCH) has identified “Parent voices” as an important component of stillbirth care in 2020”. Health outcomes after stillbirths are shaped by biological, social and economic factors along with the cultural environment. This makes the task more complex and demanding when it comes to recognizing and addressing the parents voices which have been largely absent from global stillbirth-related advocacy.

PVI is the brainchild of Stillbirth advocacy working group (SAWG) of International stillbirth alliance (ISA). The objective of the PVI is to raise the voice and participation of parents bereaved by stillbirth to strengthen advocacy for stillbirth prevention and post-stillbirth bereavement support. The PVI includes two projects: 1) “Finding Parent Voices”, a Registry of all parent support organizations globally, to be hosted on the ISA website, and 2) “Raising Parent Voices”, development and testing of an Advocacy Toolkit to support parents in raising their voices so their views and needs are heard within their country’s health goal-setting agendas. The Registry project is global while the Toolkit project is to be implemented in India and Kenya.

The aim of the Toolkit project in India is

1. To develop a brief, simple advocacy training toolkit for stillbirth parent organizations in high burden settings to lean about how to become involved in their country’s health goal setting agendas to be hosted on ISA web page.

2. Workshops in high burden settings to review and revised the toolkit.