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My Journey to Becoming a Bereavement Midwife
- Eliza
- Dec 3, 2025
- 5 min read
By Eliza Strauss, Bereavement Midwife, Bereavement Counsellor, Nurse & Bereavement Care Consultant.
I have always been comfortable with death and dying. I have been a Nurse and Midwife for over 38 years and I have always accepted it as part of my role whether caring for sick cancer patients, the elderly, or caring for babies who have died or I know will die. With life comes death and as challenging as it is, I accept it can happen at any point and at any age. As a society however, we don’t do death well and what is knowns as 'death literacy', is something I have always wanted to raise awareness around. This is particularly true for babies who die.
As a midwife, I started caring for families following the death of their baby (after miscarriage, stillbirth or newborn death), but I felt dissatisfied in the care & support I was providing to these families. I felt ill-equipped and unsure and every time I saw a mother and her partner leave the hospital, I would walk away wondering “where to from here? will they know how to seek out support? how will they navigate their grief?!”. It was unacceptable to me that these parents were walking out of our hospital doors without the necessary tools to support them further in their grief journey and so I knew I needed to do something about it.
For me the answer was in education. I decided to educate myself to better support these families. I researched for months for places who would be able to better equip me with the necessary skills and knowledge around grief and loss. Sadly, there wasn’t much out there in terms of perinatal loss training, however I found a wonderful institution in Melbourne, where I gained a qualification in (General) Bereavement Counselling & Intervention, and decided I would adapt what I had learned, to the families I would care for in a perinatal loss setting. I learned so much and was so pleased to feel my confidence growing, knowing that I could return to my workplace and implement what I had learned.
Instead of feeling helpless and hopeless and not knowing what to say or do when caring for a perinatally bereaved family, I found on the back of my bereavement training, I could apply the grief theories and models and counselling skills I had learned, and I finally felt (after 20 years), that I was making a difference to these families after one of the most tragic losses one can experience in life … the death of a baby.
Education & Training in Perinatal Loss
The next challenge I set myself, was to educate others around me. It is clear the impact that both positive and negative care can have on bereaved parents and I believe with the effective training, the negative consequences can be minimised to soften the trauma
these parents experience. I wanted to educate other health care professionals to better equip them with the tools necessary to care for these vulnerable families at this devastating time in their lives.
With my new title of ‘Bereavement Midwife’, Midwives and Nurses started to tell me how challenging they found this specialty field and they started asking me for training. As a result of this feedback, I started running perinatal loss education days as I thought, if I can share what I have learned from my training and experience with bereaved families, I would be able to help others feel more confident when they were faced with caring for a family after a pregnancy loss or following the death of their baby.
A Hospital Bereavement Support Program
Education was and will always be a big part of my plan but I also wanted to set up a structured program whereby staff would have clear policies and processes to guide them to deliver respectful and supportive care to all the bereaved parents and their families walking through our hospital doors. In 2013, I set up a structured Bereavement Support Program at my workplace, and I consistently received overwhelming positive feedback from the families as well as the midwives, nurses, and doctors who care for them.
I believe every family should receive best practice, quality bereavement care at every point in the painful trajectory of loss and grief. Therefore, the bereavement care we
provide starts the minute a diagnosis is made, through to the labour and birth or cesarean section, right through to discharge and after-care once the family is home. Support in a subsequent pregnancy after loss is also essential.
Setting up The Perinatal Loss Centre
Once I felt happy with what I had set up at my workplace, I decided to take it further afield to reach out to other health professionals who might also gain from my knowledge and what has now become my expertise. In 2018, I co-founded The Perinatal Loss Centre, an organisation dedicated to supporting families and health care professionals working with bereaved families affected by perinatal loss. This is a collaboration with Dr Renee Miller, Perinatal Psychologist, and Anita Guyett, Bereaved Parent and ex General Manager of Bereavement Care, SANDS. My passion is educating front-line health professionals who support parents following miscarriage, stillbirth, newborn death and when faced with the difficult decision to end a pregnancy.
It has been a rewarding path to becoming a Bereavement Midwife and setting up a Bereavement Support Program as well as developing my training programs.
I cherish and thank the families I have supported over the years and what they have taught me and remember them and their babies always.
The Perinatal Loss Centre offers
Online training - Perinatal Loss in Practice: What Hospital Staff Need to Know’.
Workplace training - for midwives, doctors & nurses.
Consultation to maternity hospitals - how to set up or enhance their existing bereavement support program.
Staff mentoring &/or debriefing following a perinatal loss
For training information, visit : theperinatallosscentre.com.au or email Eliza at emstrauss99@gmail.com
My Pebble Urn
In early 2025, and after 38 years of working in hospitals, I decided to walk away from the hospital setting and turn to something meaningful while still supporting bereaved parents and founded My Pebble Urn.
More recently, bereaved parents are responding to an increasing demand for meaningful and respectful memorialisation options, often seeking out thoughtful and sensitive ways to remember and honour their baby who has died.
My Pebble Urn is a compassionate and sensitive business. I hand make customised clay urns to hold a baby's ashes after cremation and no two urns are ever the same. Parents may choose an inscription such as their baby's name, an important date or a few meaningful words which I do by hand on top of the urn.
These urns can foster connection between mothers, fathers and their babies during their difficult time of their loss.
Due to enquiries around urns for children, adults and pets, I have expanded my services to include these options as a keepsake* urn.
(* a portion of ashes may be lovingly placed inside any of our urns for children & adults or pets).
For enquiries: mypebbleurn.com.au
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