In Australia, father founds organization to support families after losing children — ABC News Australia

In Australia, Melbourne resident Nick Olney, after losing two sons, founded the charity No Harry to Hold together with his wife Olga. It provides handprint and footprint kits to neonatal intensive care units so families can keep mementos after losing a child, ABC News Australia reports.

The couple's son Harry died less than two days after being born in 2020. While the child was in hospital, Olney's wife spent most of those 45 hours in a medically induced coma. The couple lost their second son, PJ, at 18 weeks of pregnancy in 2022.

Kits for preserving memories

After Harry's death, a friend of Olney's brought a printing kit to the hospital, and a nurse helped preserve the boy's handprints and footprints. The father took one of Harry's tiny footprint prints with him on a trip to Cape York, the northernmost point of mainland Australia.

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Nick and Olga Olney established No Harry to Hold in 2023. Before that, Nick began informally speaking with other parents who had experienced the loss of children. He said men who had lost babies many years earlier contacted him but had been unable to tell others about it.

Limited availability of support

According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, an average of six children are stillborn in the country every day, while another two die within 28 days of birth. At the same time, access to specialized support after perinatal loss varies by region.

A survey of more than 100 Australian pregnancy and childbirth support services found that only one-quarter had a dedicated bereavement midwife. Nearly 90% of services had formal plans for follow-up support for mothers after a child's death, while fathers were barely mentioned separately in the study's findings. Olney aims to provide kits to all 23 neonatal intensive care units in Australia. He plans to make the final delivery to Monash Children's Hospital in Melbourne, where Harry was born.