Midwives supporting families through loss: Highlights of PAIL's 2025 Connected in Care Conference

Above photo: L-R: Tiffany Fung, RM, Jenna Bly, RM, Althea Jones, RM, and Michelle La Fontaine, Regional Manager at PAIL

The Pregnancy and Infant Loss (PAIL) Network hosted its second biannual perinatal loss conference, Connected in Care, from Sep. 24-26, 2025. The event brought together health-care professionals and families from across Canada with a shared goal: improve the quality of care and support for those who experience a pregnancy loss or infant death.

Ontario midwives had a strong presence at the conference, contributing insights from their expertise and leadership in supporting families through pregnancy and neonatal loss and bereavement through compassionate care, resource guidance and best clinical practices. Michelle La Fountaine, Regional Program Manager for PAIL, shared on the importance of midwifery work: "Bereaved families deserve seamless, compassionate care across disciplines. Midwives offer vital support—combining clinical skill with emotional presence and cultural sensitivity—ensuring no family navigates loss alone and every experience is met with dignity."

Althea Jones, RM and AOM President, was the pre-conference keynote speaker, presenting “Holding Space: Lessons from a Culturally Safe Midwifery Model for Bereavement Care.” In her remarks, Jones shared how the care philosophy at their practice, Ancestral Hands, offers practical and powerful guidance for supporting bereaved families. Rooted in relationship-centered principles, Jones highlighted compassionate approaches to communication and presence that honour diverse experiences of loss, noting that grief is both individual and collective.

Jones centered the importance of cultural safety, emphasizing that if health-care providers do not attend to “the systemic trauma or narratives of harm with counternarratives of dignity and affirmation, the care we provide will never be geared to true healing. Cultural safety is healing. Cultural safety is necessary.” While racially and culturally concordant care can most effectively foster cultural safety, when not available, the principles of supporting cultural safety and understanding the weight that families carry from systemic racism, violence and generational harm must be at the forefront in best practices.

Jones emphasized that midwives must include both the knowledge and naming of potential harms within medical and obstetric spaces. Culturally safe care acknowledges that families’ experiences of grief may be shaped or intensified by their intersecting identities and life circumstances. By offering services geared to the whole person and their needs, including mental health support, social work, immigration support, food security and more, practitioners create space to support individuals to work through grief. Jones shared how midwifery-informed practices—shaped by trust, cultural humility, and deep listening—strengthen bereavement support, especially for marginalized and racialized communities.

Jenna Robertson Bly, RM, and Tiffany Fung, RM, presented the work of their innovative interdisciplinary primary care team in “A Midwifery-Led Early Pregnancy Clinic: Midwifery and Obstetric Collaboration to Improve Care at Michael Garron Hospital for Patients Experiencing Complications of the First Trimester of Pregnancy.”

The Midwifery and Toronto Community Health (MATCH) program offers perinatal and postpartum services, as well as medical abortion, contraceptive care and referrals. MATCH midwives staff the hospital’s Early Pregnancy Clinic, where they reduce wait times, improve follow-up and provide compassionate, patient-centred care for those experiencing early pregnancy loss. The presentation highlighted the clinic’s midwifery-led approach to supporting patients navigating complex clinical care, grief and loss.

Robertson Bly and Fung shared their team’s vision of a “system without discharges”: any pregnant client accessing the program for perinatal care can receive counselling and services from an integrated team of multidisciplinary providers with follow-up care in community and in hospital.

The event featured an interactive environment entitled, “Contemplative Spacemaking and its Application in Perinatal Bereavement Settings,” designed by Kory McGrath, RM, along with Sasha Kamkin, RN, and videographer Zachary Scholtz. As Master of Design students at OCAD University, the trio created Virtual Hydrotherapy, a quality improvement project piloted at Oak Valley Health that transforms hospital rooms into immersive spaces using projection mapping of cinematic nature scenes and water soundscapes. McGrath and team shared their aim to reimagine perinatal care spaces and offer a unique approach to supporting grief and healing: “By leveraging the intersection of technology, design and compassionate care, we seek to create healing spaces that honour the tenderness that the liminal moments in life deserve.”

Underlying the project is the understanding that conventional labour and postpartum units can be distressing for families experiencing perinatal loss, highlighting the need for more sensitive, healing environments. This innovation promotes calm, reduces anxiety and fosters moments of meaning during birth, loss or end-of-life care. This contemplative room allowed conference attendees to experience a safe space to attend to their own grief.

PAIL resources and International Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day – Oct 15, 2025

October 15 is International Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day. Midwives are encouraged to participate in and share information about PAIL’s Wave of Light events (virtual and in-person) and/or explore other local resources. Visit the PAIL website to learn more and register.

The PAIL network offers a wealth of resources for clinicians and families who have experienced loss. Midwives can learn more about PAIL resources, including peer support programs, workshops, pamphlets, conferences and community events, on their website, on Facebook and Instagram.

Thank you to the midwives who contributed to PAIL’s Connected in Care conference and to all midwives across the province for the vital role you provide in supporting families across Ontario.