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Background: Voluntary and community sector bereavement services are central to bereavement support in the UK. Aim: To determine service providers' perspectives on access to their support before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Design: Mixed methods study using an explanatory sequential design: (1) Cross-sectional online survey of UK bereavement services; (2) Qualitative interviews with staff and volunteers at selected services. Settings/participants: 147 services participated in the survey; 24 interviews were conducted across 14 services. Results: 67.3% of services reported there were groups with unmet needs not accessing their services before the pandemic; most frequently people from minoritised ethnic communities (49%), sexual minority groups (26.5%), deprived areas (24.5%) and men (23.8%). Compared with before the pandemic, 3.4% of services were seeing more people from minoritised ethnic groups, while 6.1% were seeing fewer. 25.2% of services did not collect ethnicity data. Qualitative findings demonstrated the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on minoritised ethnic communities, including disruption to care/mourning practices, and the need for culturally appropriate support. During the pandemic outreach activities were sometimes deprioritised; however, increased collaboration was also reported. Online provision improved access but excluded some. Positive interventions to increase equity included collecting client demographic data; improving outreach, language accessibility and staff representation; supporting other professionals to provide bereavement support; local collaboration and co-production. Conclusions: Service providers report inequities in access to bereavement support. Attention needs to be paid to identifying, assessing and meeting unmet needs for appropriate bereavement support. Identified positive interventions can inform service provision and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In female sheep and goats, exposure to males can be used to induce ovulation and thus control and synchronise fertility. This 'male effect' offers simple, cost-effective, and hormone-free management of reproduction in flocks and herds but, despite decades of research, significant gaps in our knowledge impede commercial application. Many of these gaps can be traced back to misconceptions in the early documentation of the male effect, and others are the result of uncontrolled factors in experimental design. Consequently, it is often difficult to draw conclusions from past research, to further our understanding of the phenomenon, and to make recommendations for industry application. Here, we describe 2 aspects of the male stimulus used to elicit the male effect that are often uncontrolled - the novelty of the stimulus males and factors that contribute to variability in the potency of the male stimulus. We discuss the physiology that underpins novelty, including the individual specificity of the sociosexual signals emitted by the male, and the concomitant ability of females to distinguish among individual males and remember them. Importantly, an understanding of the issue of novelty can make it easier to use the male effect in commercial practice. We also discuss difficulties in interpretation caused by variation in endpoints of the male effect (from neuroendocrine reaction to birth). We conclude that more rigour is needed in the control and reporting of male novelty, in preexperimentation separation of the sexes, and in extrapolation from detection of early responses to the male stimulus to reproductive outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]