Supporting bereaved students at university: Balancing institutional standards and reputation alongside individual compassion and care.

Bereaved university students in the UK are an overlooked population in research, policy, and practice. In this article, we examine the implications of this neglect via (1) international literature on bereavement in young people; (2) international literature on bereavement in higher education students; (3) UK and US literature on workplace bereavement and its implications for universities in preparing the future workforce; and (4) findings from a scoping study of 90 UK universities' bereavement support, which identified no shared comprehensive strategy for student bereavement. Our findings show an urgent need for UK universities to address this neglect.

Service failures and challenges in responding to people bereaved through drugs and alcohol: An interprofessional analysis.

This article reports findings from the first two stages of a three-stage qualitative study which considered the role of services, including public, private and charitable organisations, in responding to the needs of adults bereaved following the drug and/or alcohol-related death of someone close. The study, the first of its kind to explore the landscape and role of services in substance use deaths, was conducted over two sites: south west England and Scotland. In stage 1 of the research, adopting both convenience and purposive sampling, data were collected via semi-structured interviews on experiences and support needs of bereaved individuals (n = 106). In stage 2, six focus groups were conducted with a purposive sample of practitioners (n = 40), including those working for the police, coroner's service, procurator fiscal depute (Scotland), health service, funeral service, press, clergy, Public Health England, Drugs Policy Unit, bereavement counselling/support and alcohol and drug treatment services, to investigate how services may better respond to this bereavement. Thematic analysis from both data-sets identified two overarching themes. The first, focusing on practitioner responses, captures how these bereaved people may meet with inadequate, unkind, and discriminatory responses from services. Having to navigate unfamiliar, fragmented, and time-consuming procedures compounds the bereaved's distress at an already difficult time, illustrated by a 'mapping' of relevant services. The second relates to challenges and opportunities for those responding. Service failures reflect practitioners' poor understanding of both substance use bereavement and the range of other practitioners and services involved. Those bereaved are a poorly understood, neglected and stigmatised group of service users. There is a need for services to respond without judgement or insensitive language, and provide information about, communicate and work closely with, other services despite differences in working practices and cultures. These recommendations could positively affect bereaved peoples' experiences, alleviating stress and overwhelm at a particularly vulnerable time.

Compassion or stigma? How adults bereaved by alcohol or drugs experience services.

How to promote compassionate care within public services is a concern in several countries; specifically, some British healthcare scandals highlight poor care for service users who may readily be stigmatised as 'other'. The article therefore aims to understand better the relationship between stigma and compassion. As people bereaved by a drug- or alcohol-related death often experience stigma, the article draws on findings from a major British study, conducted during 2012-2015 by the authors, of people bereaved in this way, in order to see how service provision can be improved. One hundred and six bereaved family members were interviewed in depth about their experiences of loss and support. Thematic analysis developed theoretical understandings of participants' lived experiences. This article analyses our data on how bereaved people experienced stigma and kindness from practitioners of all kinds. We found that stigma can be mitigated by small acts of kindness from those encountered after the death. Stigma entails stereotyping, othering and disgust, each of which has emotional and cognitive aspects; kindness entails identification and fellow feeling; professionalism has classically entailed emotional detachment, but interviewees found cold professionalism as disturbing as explicit disgust. Drawing on theories concerning the end of life, bereavement and emotional labour, the article analyses the relationship between stigma, kindness and professionalism, and identifies some strategies to counter stigmatisation and foster compassion.

From hope to hope: the experience of older Chinese people with advanced cancer.

In our study that explored the current end-of-life care provision for Chinese older people with advanced/terminal cancer, hope emerged as a significant aspect of coping with their condition. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with a group of older people, their family carers and health professionals, this article explores participants' constructions of hope in terms of what they were hoping for, how their hopes helped them cope with their illness and what sociocultural resources they drew on to build and sustain these hopes. While acknowledging similarities to Western studies of hope in terminal illness, this article identifies significant divergences in terms of the impact of different sociocultural values and their implications for clinical practice in light of an unfavourable health care environment for patients with advanced cancer and a social support system sustained mainly by Chinese families. It argues that hope represents an important resource for coping with terminal illness among these patients.

The "moment of death".

The "moment of death," once a dominant concept in preparing for a "good death", has been eclipsed by a focus on the wider concept of the "dying trajectory". However, findings from interviews with 25 bereaved individuals suggest that dying loved ones' final moments may still be experienced as highly significant in their own right. In some accounts the dying individual's final moments did not feature or made little impression, either because the survivor was not present, or there was no obviously definable moment, or because other, usually medical factors, such as whether to resuscitate the person, took precedence. However, in six cases such moments were constructed as profound, special, and memorable occasions. These constructions are explored in relation to achieving a good death, the dying trajectory as a whole, and making sense of the bereavement experience. Their implications for sociological theories of identity and embodiment are also considered.