Cooling facilities in paediatric palliative care: a ritual form of mourning? A scoping literature review

Parental grief is often found to be more intense and prolonged than other types of loss. Cooling facilities such as air-conditioned rooms or cold cots can allow parents to spend more time with their child by slowing the body?s decomposition. Similar to other bereavement interventions, the implementation of these technologies is largely practice based. We conducted a scoping literature review on cooling facilities to contribute to the development of more evidence-based principles of good practice. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews was used as the methodological protocol. The review shows that the provision of cooling facilities is an integral part of the perinatal and paediatric palliative care setting in the UK, where cool rooms and cold cots seem to function as a form of post-mortem ritualisation that protects the parent-child relationship. However, availability does not necessarily mean accessibility as families whose child died from a sudden death may not be referred to the hospice by their general practitioner or the hospital. Although cooling facilities support recent theories of grief and are positively evaluated by the families who have used them, more and larger-scale research is needed on their impact on families? grief trajectories and the wellbeing of healthcare professionals.
+ ID der Publikation: unilu_82790 + Sprache: Englisch + Letzte Aktualisierung: 2024-08-12 11:11:01