Bereavement needs assessment for specialist palliative care services has been highlighted as important by NICE guidance on palliative care for adults with cancer. Identifying and implementing appropriate bereavement measurement tools has remained a challenge. This paper identifies and reviews bereavement measurement tools to determine their suitability for use within bereavement services and hospice settings. Cochrane, MEDLINE, PsycINFO and CINAHL, electronic databases were searched, yielding 486 papers. From fifty-nine full text papers appraised, 10 measurement tools were analysed in detail. Some tools had been tested on specific populations which limited transferability to specialist palliative care settings; some lacked adequate theoretical links and were not effective in discriminating between normal and complicated grief reactions; and some lacked clear evidence of validity or reliability. Based on these criteria, conclusions are drawn about the suitability of particular tools for UK bereavement services and hospice settings where intervention is delivered by both trained professionals and volunteers.
User involvement is now an internationally established feature of health and social care, service planning and delivery. This paper discusses the background context of user involvement as a prelude to describing the processes pursued in changing communication systems for bereaved service users. This qualitative study aimed to gain a deeper understanding of service user experiences of an adult bereavement group in a hospice setting in Northern Ireland. The key focus of the study was the development of a bereavement information leaflet. To achieve this, a one-off focus group meeting with seven users who were purposively selected based on their previous experience of bereavement services was held. The findings are presented using a thematic content analysis approach. These illustrate the experiences of service users and their recommendations, which informed the content and language of a new information leaflet. This paper demonstrates how service user participation can inform changes to service delivery in a manner that avoids the potential for consultation fatigue and tokenism.
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