Parallel Pathways

Parallel Pathways Additional Guidance

The Parallel Pathways project explores how prior experiences of reproductive healthcare impact subsequent ones. This guidance relates to the questions about your experiences of different healthcare settings:

  • How your familiarity with consultations or procedures made you feel

  • How practitioners acknowledged and engaged with your history

  • Whether your were encouraged or discouraged from making connections between experiences

  • What could have been done better

  • Whether any outcomes could have changed if things had been done differently

You may find reflecting on these experiences challenging, if you would like some guidance you can review the examples below of experiences that others have shared. These include both positive and negative experiences. Small details often matter, so take your time and include anything you feel is relevant. For each healthcare setting, you can describe a single encounter or several, whatever feels right for you.

Please note the examples below are summarised to provide the basic details but in the full responses, individuals described the sequence of events and how this made them feel and how it impacted their onward journey.

In relation to practical care, survey respondents described:

  • midwives recognising their anxiety and offering to check the baby’s heartbeat first before continuing with the normal appointment sequence.

  • reliving the experience of staff forgetting about them whilst managing their pregnancy loss and leaving them in a waiting room full of heavily pregnant people for hours.

  • a consultant reading notes before an appointment and acknowledging their history immediately.

  • appreciating the feeling of control when a sonographer asking them whether they wanted to see the screen or not during a scan.

  • how they refused follow up scans because they could not face repeating their history to new staff each time.

In relation to the environment, survey respondents described:

  • the benefits of the separation and discretion of the Early Pregnancy Unit in comparison with general waiting areas.

  • a radio feeling out of place and becoming a lasting trigger for them.

  • the setting of a routine scan feeling geared toward happy news, which made receiving difficult news even harder.

In relation to communication and language, survey respondents described:

  • a practitioner moving straight to management options without giving them space to process the bad news they had just received.

  • how a consultant talked them through each step of a procedure and discussing the options, helping them to feel supported and involved with the decision to stop.

  • the distress caused by a practitioner assuming they had a baby at home, not realising the appointment was related to a termination.

  • a GP offering congratulations at an appointment and feeling unsure how to respond.

  • feeling alienated in antenatal classes which had no scope for acknowledging people with complex histories or medicalised pregnancies.

In relation to information sharing, survey respondents described:

  • the distress caused by a nurse expecting them to be heavily pregnant because their miscarriage hadn’t been recorded in the system.

  • being left with a folder from a previous pregnancy and not knowing what to do with it.

In relation to mental health support, survey respondents described:

  • wanting to talk about the impact of previous losses during pregnancy, but not being given any opportunity to so without committing to a full process for a mental health referral.

  • feeling empowered by engaging with one-to-one hypnobirthing support to talk openly about their experiences.

In relation to follow on care, survey respondents described:

  • the positive impact of seeing the same midwife regularly meaning that appointments could be tailored to their history.

  • frustration at needing to repeat their story at every GP appointment and seeking private tests to make progress instead.