As a result, fathers can often feel excluded and encounter great difficulty communicating their needs.
An essential resource tool designed to support fathers of premature or sick babies through this traumatic experience, is now available from BLISS, The Premature Baby Charity.
The leaflet Premature or Sick Baby? Facts for Fathers provides fathers with practical advice on how they can best look after themselves, their babies and their partners, during what can be a very stressful and lonely time. Having a premature or sick baby can be a very different experience to having a full term or healthy baby. With mother and baby in hospital fathers can be left to juggle a job, care for other children as well as travelling to the hospital to see their poorly little one.
The leaflet contains specific information on:
 Tips on managing other children, family and friends, and a job
Checklists to make sure fathers have everything covered
An explanation of "who 's who" in hospital and tips on communicating with the staff
A tool kit with website addresses and places to look for more details and help
A list of essential contacts that fathers can photocopy and keep with them.
There is also space to for them to fill in their own list of important people. This can also be downloaded in an electronic version on the BLISS website.
Speaking about the leaflet, Justine Pepperell, Family Support Manager at BLISS, said:
' 'The information in this leaflet will really help fathers cope with this difficult time. While the mother and baby tend to get the majority of the attention and concern, fathers are still emotionally involved and, on top of this, may often have to look after other family members as well as keep going to work. ' '
To support the launch of the leaflet, BLISS has also created a new online forum on the BLISS message board, exclusively for fathers. Thebabywebsite.com Forum for Fathers is also a place where fathers can discuss their concerns, post specific questions and realise they are not alone in their situation - a common feeling among dads.
BLISS, the premature baby charity, is dedicated to making sure that more babies born prematurely or sick in the UK survive and that each one has the best quality of life. One in eight babies are born premature or sick - that's 80,000 babies every year.
Around 17,000 of these babies need intensive care and the figure is rising - more and more babies are born prematurely or have a low birth weight. Bliss seeks to achieve this through supporting new developments and innovations in care, supporting parents and carers of premature and sick newborn babies and campaigning for improvements in neonatal care.
For a free copy of the leaflet and more information about BLISS
View Leaflet
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