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This article reports on a small qualitative review of the impact on families when a baby dies on a neonatal unit. The study aim was to see how the service that is provided in a tertiary neonatal un...

Colin Murray Parkes with Cruse patron Her Majesty the Queen at St James Palace, celebrating Cruse’s 60th anniversaryI was honoured to be asked to write something at this time, as Colin steps down a...

A population survey finds that bereaved people draw upon diverse sources of support in their communities, from both formal services and informal networks of care. The formal service most fr...

In this article Cruse Life President Colin Murray Parkes describes the early days of Cruse and how pioneers brought about the science of the care of the dying and bereaved, tracing the development ...

As this issue celebrates 60 years since the founding of Cruse, it is timely to review Bereavement Care, an important element in the development of the organisation, in the context of other ...

Cruse Bereavement Care is marking its 60th year with events throughout 2019. In July the anniversary conference Bereavement Care – Past Present and Future hosted an international line-up of...

This paper explores how ‘recovery’ from grief is negotiated in bereavement care practice in England. What constitutes recovery from grief remains contested in bereavement research and practice. In this paper, I outline some of the debates in the literature concerning what constitutes recovery following bereavement before presenting interview data from bereavement counsellors and support workers to discover how practitioners negotiate recovery following bereavement in practice. The findings show mixed responses to the use of the term recovery. I highlight six components that emerged across the accounts and that the participants agreed were important to the success of bereavement counselling. However, rather than provide an empirical basis for recovery, the findings in this paper reveal the conflicts and ambiguities that exist in bereavement care practice.

Steven Wibberley joined Cruse as Chief Executive in April 2018. In this article he talks to Kate Mitchell about building on the 60 year history of Cruse and how to implement a vision for the future...

Many people experience acute isolation, lack of support and social stigma following a drug or alcohol related bereavement. This article highlights trends within drug and alcohol-related bereavement and the common themes which surface when someone dies in this way. It goes on to explore the work of the BEAD – bereaved through drugs and alcohol project between Cruse Bereavement Care and Adfam in supporting this overlooked and under-supported group of bereaved people. It gives a particular emphasis on how BEAD’s team of dedicated, trained, peer support volunteers – all themselves bereaved through alcohol and drugs – are playing a significant role.

A survey of bereaved clients of four funeral providers in Australia confirms a public health model predicting that over half the group would demonstrate low risk of complicated grief, another third moderate risk, while a small minority would meet the criteria for prolonged grief disorder. The survey also shows differing patterns of need and sources of support for each of the three groups. While our findings support targeting the bereavement care provided by health services, our primary interest is in the care received by most bereaved people. Some is provided in the community through the everyday activities of healthcare professionals. Most comes from a range of people already involved in the everyday lives of those recently bereaved. We contend that the most effective way to provide bereavement care is to support these ‘everyday assets’, ensuring that their care is recognised, appreciated, and not disrupted by over-reach from professional services.

Bereft people frequently use metaphors to describe their grief. Metaphors can both contribute to clarity or understanding and be confusing or misconstrued. Bereavement carers can easily assume they understand metaphors used by individuals and families rather than skillfully following metaphors. This article discusses and demonstrates perspectives and tools for understanding and working with metaphors. A particular metaphor – that of the ghost – is used to illustrate possible ways to follow metaphors in grief and bereavement care. Links to related scholarship are shown to uphold and complement the approaches described, especially a model created by Richard Kopp.

Children's bereavement poses a challenge not only for children themselves but for the families, communities, volunteers and professionals who support them. The Irish Childhood Bereavement Network set out to develop a framework to provide a comprehensive guide for children's bereavement support. The model is based on contemporary literature, existing policy and the views of professions, volunteers and parents. The process resulted in the ‘Irish Childhood Bereavement Care Pyramid’. The major pillars of children's needs, support/service responses and staff competencies are described at four levels, basic up to complex. The aim of the Pyramid is to guide adults to ensure that children are provided with the information and reassurance they need around a bereavement, to promote early intervention as appropriate and to recognise those few children who need specialist support to learn to live with their bereavement. Family context and the child's changing developmental status are emphasised as core consid...

Bereavement, due to the loss of a significant person through death, presents imprisoned persons with a unique challenge, yet so very little is known about the experience of bereavement behind bars. This paper, based on a qualitative practitioner-research study, explores the experience of bereavement in prison through drawing on the author's counselling work with bereaved male inmates of a Scottish prison and focussing on the bereavement experience as lived and described by one client in his own words. The paper depicts the experience of bereavement behind bars as deeply distressing and despairing. It portrays how the powerful sociocultural prescriptions of the prison environment can cause the grief of prison inmates to be profoundly disenfranchised and demonstrates how this can impact hugely negatively on their coping ability. The paper calls for the development of support systems to ensure a level of bereavement care more attuned to the needs of imprisoned persons.

The new Bereavement Care Service Standards set out what needs to be addressed in order for services to be both safe and effective in meeting the needs of bereaved people. Launched in January 2014, they have been developed to apply to all services providing bereavement support in any sector, and to provide a useful benchmarking tool. The Standards have been developed as part of the Gold Standard Bereavement Care Project, and this article outlines the development process, and shows how the Standards can apply to the voluntary sector, NHS service providers, and to individual practitioners.

In this paper we argue that anatomical pathology technologists (APTs) have been overlooked as a key group of healthcare practitioners who play a role in bereavement care. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of a mortuary team in a large urban hospital, we examine the technical and emotional components of the APT role, including how the concept of patient care is utilised in the mortuary. We argue that their work with other healthcare practitioners and professionals illustrates how APTs offer a ‘bridge’ between the immediacy of a death, after-death care and subsequent viewing of the deceased person, thereby providing a vital and under-acknowledged service for bereaved people. We conclude that through education and the promotion of mortuary activities APTs are developing a ‘community of practice’ that moves beyond an outdated perception of ‘dirty work’ towards a more enlightened vision of mortuary settings and APTs as important components of hospital-based bereavement care services.

The Armed Forces has a long and established tradition of supporting the families and relatives of personnel who die in service. However, recent events in the Middle East have seen a substantial increase in operational deaths, thereby placing extra demands on existing bereavement support mechanisms. In response to a perceived need, Cruse Bereavement Care secured funding over three years from the Department of Health, to design a bespoke military bereavement support package. The main focus of the support was to train Cruse bereavement volunteers to be conversant in the ways of the military, thereby facilitating a more meaningful and beneficial interaction, be it face-to-face or on the phone. This article documents how the initiative came about and details the foundations of the supplementary support currently in place. It is followed by a description of how the programme was put into practice by two Cruse volunteers, Beryl Austoni and Hilary Linsey

All too often it is assumed that the differing priorities, values and ethics of practitioners and researchers are irreconcilable. This article describes the long, sometimes difficult and ultimately fruitful process of setting up an evaluation of the efficacy of the bereavement support service offered by Cruse Bereavement Care Scotland (CBCS). CBCS invited researchers from Utrecht University's Centre for Bereavement Research and Intervention to work with them to design and deliver a controlled trial that would compare outcomes for recipients of each of its three modes of 'stepped care' with those of a group of bereaved people receiving no care. The proposal raised a number of major ethical and practical issues, which were successfully resolved through open discussion and negotiation, providing a positive example of practitioner/ researcher collaboration in a research endeavour.

In response to the article by Larson and Hoyt in the previous issue of Bereavement Care in which they challenge his ‘pessimism’ about the efficacy of grief counselling, Robert Neimeyer here reviews what is currently known about the empirical status of bereavement interventions, drawing in particular on a recent comprehensive meta-analysis of over 60 controlled studies. He concludes from this evidence that grief counsellors indeed have much to offer bereaved people who have the greatest support needs following a death, but that they also need to acknowledge the limits to their knowledge of what works, with which clients, when, and why.

In this article, the case is made for consideration of chronic sorrow as a non-pathological reality for many grievers. For those who live with an ongoing sorrow, the test of health is their ability to also experience joy and perform the necessary functions of their lives, even while living with chronic sorrow. Personal and national examples are included to enrich the discussion.

This paper reports on a systematic literature review of bereavement and bereavement care commissioned in Scotland to assist the development of policy and practice there. The review identified and appraised papers from a range of health and social care settings in which bereavement care b a feature, such as acute, hospice- and hospital-based care including neonatal and obstetric, community and primary care, mental health and learning disability services, and care of older people, families and children. Specific types of death were also reviewed, eg traumatic and from (tiseases such as HIV/AIDS. Key messages for each setting and type were identified and overall themes were drawn out which cut across at settings and types. These, it is proposed, represent important features of bereavement and bereavement care which, if acknowledged and addressed, could enhance services.

(2006). Volunteer befriending as an intervention for depression. Bereavement Care: Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 27-30.

This is an electronic version of an article published in Walter, T., 2006. Telling the dead man's tale: bridging the gap between the living and the dead. Bereavement Care, 25 (2), pp. 23-26. Bereavement Care is available online at: http://www.informaworld.com/openurl? genre=articleiWalter_Bt_Care_2006_25_2_ p23.pdf: This is an electronic version of an article published in Walter, T., 2006. Telling the dead man's tale: bridging the gap between the living and the dead. Bereavement Care, 25 (2), pp. 23-26. Bereavement Care is available online at: http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=02682621&volume=25&issue=2&spage=23

(2006). ‘Forgotten victims’?—adults look back on their childhood bereavement by homicide. Bereavement Care: Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 12-15.

(2005). Traumatic bereavement and the Asian tsunami. Bereavement Care: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 23-26.

(2005). Grief, loss, and the quest for meaning. Bereavement Care: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 27-30.

(2005). Children exposed to war in Afghanistan. Bereavement Care: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 31-34.

(2005). Do professionals disempower bereaved people? Bereavement Care: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 7-10.

(2005). Young people bereaved by suicide: what hinders and what helps. Bereavement Care: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 11-14.

(2003). Changing Hindu attitudes to cremation in the UK. Bereavement Care: Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 25-28.

This sensitive, moving and poetic biographical essay will be of particular interest to readers of Bereavement Care because of the losses not only in Charlotte’s own life but in those of her anteced...

(2000). Parents talking in the present tense about their dead child. Bereavement Care: Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 35-38.

(1997). Sexual needs of those whose partner has died. Bereavement Care: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 2-5.

(2004). Traumatic grief in the children of a Northern Irish police officer. Bereavement Care: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 11-13.

(2002). Current challenges for bereavement care. Bereavement Care: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 35-37.

(1993). Directive grief treatment in a group setting. Bereavement Care: Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 29-32.

(1993). Parental Responses to Different Types of Infant Death. Bereavement Care: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 18-21.

(1993). Psychiatric Problems Following Bereavement by Murder or Manslaughter. Bereavement Care: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 2-6.

(1992). Grief and Trauma in Children and Adolescents. Bereavement Care: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 2-10.

(1999). Bereavement recovery following the Rwandan genocide. Bereavement Care: Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 40-42.

(1998). Traditional models and theories of grief. Bereavement Care: Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 21-23.

(1997). Fifth International Conference on Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society. Bereavement Care: Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 36-38.

(1997). Separation or internalisation when a loved one dies? Bereavement Care: Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 19-21.

(1997). Child bereavement in Humberside schools. Bereavement Care: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 8-10.

Hearing the words ‘The family have been told’ on the radio or television news now has special significance for two bereavement volunteers from Cambridge Cruse Bereavement Care who, having worked with a family bereaved by a death in the services, understand all too well what these words really mean.

(1994). Participation in funerals: Two points of view. Bereavement Care: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 14-16.

Bereavement can be particularly difficult for carers, who may have been caring for many years for the person who has died. They are losing not only their loved one – whether adult or child – but al...

Henk Schut responds to Larson and Hoyt's challenge (see Bereavement Care 28 (3), winter 2009) to the prevailing pessimism about the effectiveness of grief counselling. Studies indeed show that the more formalised professional therapeutic interventions with those experiencing complicated grief reactions can be effective, but for those who have simply lost a loved one, the evidence suggests that counselling is unlikely to be effective unless the individual feels they need help, and so actively seeks it. This article summarises the evidence and goes on to argue that we are unlikely to achieve more lasting outcomes with those considered at risk of complicated or prolonged grief until we are able accurately to pinpoint what the risk factors are, and target our interventions accordingly.

(2008). Therapies for children and adolescents. Bereavement Care: Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 14-15.