Counselling in neonatal intensive care unit

Counselling is a professional intervention based on skills to communicate and to build relationships. The project "Not alone", related to counselling at our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, is aimed to let counselling become a "shared culture" for all the care givers. The first essential aspect is to form the ability of counselling through periodic courses for all professionals of the department (physicians, nurses, physiotherapists). In our department a professional counsellor is present assisting the medical staff in direct counselling. The counsellor's intervention allows a better parent orientation in the situation. A more effective sharing of these rules also facilitates the communication among parents and medical staff. Periodic meetings are established among the medical staff, in which the professional counsellor discusses difficult situations in order to share possible communicative strategies. We wanted to have not only a common communicative style, but also common subjects, independent from the characteristics of each of us. Individuals are often faced with diverse situations. For every setting that we more frequently face in communication (for example the first interview with a parent of a very preterm infant) we have built an "algorithm" that follows a pattern: (1) information always given; (2) frequent questions from parents, (3) frequent difficulties in the communication. We also need to record important moments, for instance the "case history of the communication": in fact it would be desirable to have the case history, a sheet dedicated to important communications that are absolutely to be shared with other professionals.