Name: Fauzia Paize

Organisation: Liverpool Womens Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

Award Category: Healthcare Professional

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My Plea:

My name is Fauzia Paize and I am a consultant neonatologist at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. I am honoured that I have been nominated for Health Care Professional at the 2019 Butterfly Awards

With most child deaths occurring in the neonatal period, as a neonatologist I have frequently managed end of life care in babies and appreciate that end of life and palliative care (PC) should involve a holistic approach to a complicated and emotional situation, requiring good communication, parallel planning and a pragmatic, evidence based framework of practice.
I have formulated care plans in babies with a variety of PC needs including antenatally detected fetal anomalies, not initiating intensive care in babies born too prematurely and leading difficult discussions with parents about palliative extubations when intensive care is no longer in the best interests of their baby. I am the lead clinician for bereavement, PC and family support at my trust, also chairing a hospital wide multidisciplinary bereavement committee, which has developed a program of parent experience improvement

Regionally, I am the Cheshire and Mersey Neonatal Network (CMNN) lead clinician for PC. The CMNN is part of a larger Northwest neonatal network, the Operational Delivery Network (ODN) which encompasses Greater Manchester, Lancashire and South Cumbria. I represented all neonatal units within the CMNN at the ODN Neonatal PC Project Group. I led a multidisciplinary project initiation team at the start of the process of establishing an integrated neonatal PC service in the Northwest. I arranged multidisciplinary meetings with hospitals and hospices to collate views on the services that were needed and disseminated the information at the end of the project. I am pleased to say that this work is continuing and the documents produced are in use across the Northwest. I have successfully integrated our local children’s hospice into the neonatal unit at Liverpool and have seen the huge benefits of integrating palliative care into a neonatal unit and fetal medicine unit, every day in our practice.
I am on the Association of Paediatric Palliative Medicine Formulary committee. I contribute to the neonatal dosages of drugs based on available evidence. I have gained experience of national committee work and have a good understanding of the drugs used in PC for children and babies.

I have been a NICE guideline development group member on the End of life care for infants, children and young people guideline that was published in Sept 2017. This again gave me experience of the NICE methods, national multidisciplinary committee work, guideline development at a national level and the wider aspects of paediatric palliative care
I was integral to the writing of the Together for Short Lives Perinatal Pathway for Babies with Palliative Care Needs published in 2018. This again let me further develop my committee work and I was invited to launch the pathway at the Together for Short Lives conference in 2017

I am currently the lead for the hospital for the SANDS National bereavement care pathway. The Liverpool Women’s Hospital was chosen as one of 11 pilot sites in 2017 after meetings with myself and our bereavement team who I work very closely with. I have been a guest speaker at the Together for Short Lives conference in 2017, the Child Bereavement UK conference in 2018. The national neonatal Reason conference in 2019 and also the SBK Enhancing Paediatric Palliative Care Conference in 2019 each times speaking about the area of perinatal palliative care and bereavement

If I win this award I would be able to speak as both professional and parent. I suffered my own baby loss at 23 weeks 8 years ago. As painful as this process was it gave me a new insight into the pain, trauma and difficult path to recovery that results from child death. In bereavement, the smallest things can make the healing all the more harder. As health and social care professionals we are not allowed to spend a single second contributing to the pain of these children or families and must endeavour to make this tragic journey as tolerable as possible. The bereavement of these families will be affected by the standard of care that their children receive so it is vital that we do things correctly from the moment of diagnosis.
I also featured on the BBC Two documentary ‘Hospital’ in Jan 2019. During the episode I cared for a family through the loss of one of their twins. I know that this raised awareness around baby loss and other complications in pregnancy and newborns. I have been told that I showed care, compassion and understanding towards this family. Within my nomination for this award I was told that “The feedback she has received online has been incredible. The language she uses, the empathy she shows and the genuine love she gives is a true credit to her, I hope she sees and reads just how special she is in families’ experiences.”
I work hard on social media to continue to raise awareness of baby loss and am a very involved member of the Twitter ‘community’ putting time into making a change.

I have also organised the UK’s first Baby Loss Conference in 2016 which now runs annually. Raising awareness of the impact of baby loss on families is something I have a passion for, not just for the general public but for healthcare professionals too. The reason for putting on the conference is to bring professionals together to talk about the science behind baby loss and the effect it has on families.

I am honoured to have been nominated by a family who lost their baby, Elsie. There was a Route Cause Analysis meeting where I was the external consultant on the panel. Within the nomination it was stated that “After a while of listening to professionals refer to Elsie as ‘baby’, Dr Paize stopped the conversation to ask myself and my partner our daughter’s name. This tiny gesture meant so much. It felt as though she mattered and was a human (even if only a small one!), not just a statistic or someone we weren’t connected to”

I love my job and feel grateful every day that I am able to do it. To win an award for it would be very much the icing on the cake.

What Others Have Said

I’m pretty certain Fauzia feels she ‘is just doing her job’ but she truly goes above and beyond. She supports grieving families, makes such a difference in their experience and has made significant changes in palliative and bereavement care. She has guided parents through loss, diagnosis, grieving, memory making and their continued journey.  Such a strong, inspirational lady.