Cruse Bereavement Care - News and Media

THE BEREAVEMENT PATHWAYS PROJECT

Two stakeholder events were held for the Bereavement Pathways Project - in London,on 5 March, and Birmingham on 12 February 2008, both with about 50 participants attending from all sectors relating to bereavement care and bereavement services.

The events featured a specially designed visual to illustrate a typical bereavement pathway, which provided a focus for debate and discussion at workshops.

Both days opened with an overview of the project from Debbie Kerslake, Head of Service Development and Planning for Cruse, and Tony Brookes, Chair of the Bereavement Services Association.

Tony Brookes, chair of the BSA, and Vice-chair, Dawn Chaplin

The plenary speaker for the London event was Dr Colin Murray Parkes, OBE MD DPM FRCPsych and author. He is also Life President of Cruse. He opened his talk by saying: "We must always remember that not everyone needs help. I was a little bit worried about the pathway, that everyone would end up with Cruse! I am not an organisation man but I have an interest in evidence, in research in bereavement, and there is a lot of it. Although a lot of the ‘new’ knowledge is not new at all, there are also some fascinating new developments.

"I want to focus down on some of the areas around assessment of people’s needs and how we can begin to meet these needs, matching the limited resources at our disposal."
You can read the presentation here.

Key speaker in Birmingham was Pauline Smith, Clinical Lead for End of Life Care at West Midlands Strategic Health Authority. She opened by saying how pleased she was to be supporting the work - a three-year partnership project between Cruse Bereavement Care and the Bereavement Services Association. Pauline, in her postion with the SHA, is contributing to Lord Darzi’s End of Life Care vision for the NHS, due to be published summer 2008.

“The pathway resonates with me on a personal level,” she told the delegates. “The impact of loss is one of the life events; it is part of being human and living in communities and society. Bereavement care should be part of the natural cycle of life and living. Education should have the ‘Life Journey’, to include loss and how we manage it.”

You can see Pauline's slide presentation here, to be read with her accompanying paper.

Both days involved participants in lively workshop discussions, using a visual diagram of a pathway, and concluded with a question and answer session with a panel. There was lively interaction throughout both days, and we have collated feedback here.

If you would like to participate in the project's information gathering, here is the
Bereavement Pathways Community Consultation Paper

ABOUT THE PROJECT
Recognising a need
The Bereavement Care Pathways Project started – as many initiatives do – with a meeting of interested people who recognised a need at grass roots level. Tony Brookes, Chair of the Bereavement Services Association, and Catherine Betley, Service & Development Manager at Cruse Bereavement Care, agreed that when someone dies, a clearer pathway from NHS based bereavement services into support services in the community would greatly benefit bereaved people. An application to the Department of Health for funding for a three year project to help achieve this outcome was successful, and to date a steering group has been formed, a project officer has started work and the Bereavement Pathways Project is underway.

Objectives
One objective of the project is to establish a key partnership between the NHS and the voluntary sector by linking hospital-based services, particularly those in acute trusts, with those based in the community which provide a range of services, including longer term support for bereaved people. Another is to increase access to services for bereaved people whoever they are, however and wherever a death occurred.

The key Department of Health advice document “When a Patient Dies”, has contributed significantly to the development of bereavement services within the NHS by highlighting areas of good practice, and it is anticipated that the development of an effective bereavement pathway will illustrate additional good practice within the voluntary sector. This may lead to additional recommendations to support closer and more effective working across all sectors; thereby providing both an overview of the current awareness of guidance in the NHS and community bereavement services, providing an evaluation of the impact and implementation of those guidelines across all sectors, and enabling further demonstration of good practice to be highlighted, and possibly incorporated, in any future DH advice.

Good practice and participation
Throughout the life of the project and beyond we will be collecting examples of good practice with a view to sharing this within the bereavement sector generally through articles and events. To this end there were two one-day stakeholder events in Birmingham and London in spring 2008 and there will be several pilots in areas of England to identify good, and also not so good, practice and test proposals, improvements and innovations. Jill Sanders, who is the project officer, would very much like to hear from everyone interested in the project.
Please contact jill.sanders@cruse.org.uk or call 020 8939 9534.

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