Abstract
Miscarriage is increasingly gaining recognition, both in scientific literature and media outlets, as a loss that has significant and lasting effects on parents, though often disenfranchised and overlooked by both personal support networks and healthcare providers. For both men and women, miscarriage can usher in intense grief, despair, and difficulty coping, and for women in particular, there is evidence of increased prevalence of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. Additionally, miscarriage can contribute to decreased relationship satisfaction and increased risk of separation, all while stigma and disenfranchisement create a sense of isolation. Despite this increased need for support, research indicates that many parents experience their healthcare providers as dismissive of the significance of the loss and as primarily focusing only on the physical elements of care. Research exploring the barriers to providers engaging in more biopsychosocial-oriented care has identified time constraints, lack of resources, lack of training in addressing loss, and compassion fatigue as key areas for intervention. This paper will review the biopsychosocial elements of miscarriage and discuss a multidisciplinary, family-oriented approach that can be implemented in healthcare settings to ensure a high quality and holistic level of care for individuals, couples, and families experiencing pregnancy loss.
Highlights
Miscarriage is a medical event with a complex combination of psychosocial sequelae, research indicates that healthcare providers and clinical teams often fail to attend to the complex and sensitive nature of miscarriage [1, 2]
We suggest three key strategies for implementation of a family-oriented biopsychosocial approach to miscarriage care that can facilitate these important action items while simultaneously addressing the barriers that impede their use
Though there is extensive research on psychological outcomes after miscarriage, primarily for women, there remain significant gaps in the literature base regarding a family-oriented understanding of the experience of miscarriage, family level grief outcomes and relational impacts, and biopsychosocialoriented healthcare for patients and families facing this loss
Summary
Miscarriage is a medical event with a complex combination of psychosocial sequelae, research indicates that healthcare providers and clinical teams often fail to attend to the complex and sensitive nature of miscarriage [1, 2]. Miscarriage is a traumatic loss, but not always recognized as such by important sources of support in their social and healthcare networks [1,2,3,4]. This paper will review the biopsychosocial elements of miscarriage, discuss barriers to biopsychosocial approaches to miscarriage care, and propose a family-oriented, multidisciplinary approach that can address these barriers and provide parents with holistic, sensitive care after their loss
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