Huge success for Teesside charity that supports baby loss families
Leo's helps with mental health and wellbeing of parents who've lost children
A Teesside charity say they've seen huge success in its mental health and wellbeing support for families experiencing baby loss.
Lottie King lost her own son Leo a decade ago - he was born at 24 weeks and passed away at just four hours old
She set up the charity in his name and said: "Our charity's been going now for around eight years and specifically our baby loss service, which has been commissioned by the Redcar and Cleveland and Middlesbrough family hubs project, has been incredibly busy in the last sort of two and a half years since that opened. It's been a whirlwind of being incredibly humbled and privileged to walk along people during some of the most difficult and hardest days of their lives.
"One of the biggest things that we wanted to capture was the actual mental health impact on parents. We've been collecting data on PTSD symptoms since we started which has been really beneficial to validate what many of us, who've experienced loss, know that we do end up symptomatic of PTSD and this data has certainly secured that.
"I think at the moment we're at 95 percent of parents at the point of entry are symptomatic of PTSD. We've been really fortunate that we've been able to build and create a service that's provided such person-centered and unique to families that have experienced the losses.
"We've been working with families for around two years now and we're finally starting to see some of the data and if our project is working. What we've been really blown away by is that the interventions that we have which includes everything from peer support, to counselling, to trauma therapies, we now have 100 percent reduction rate in PTSD symptoms at the point of discharge, so if a parent has engaged fully with our service, and accessed everything that they needed to that's been specific for them at the point where they're discharged, they're no longer symptomatic of PTSD, which is incredible."
Find out more and get in touch with Leo's on their website.