Objective: Most Australian palliative care services offer bereavement support services and typically this is regardless of risk or need. Palliative care services need to know how to use their limited resources to deliver best bereavement care and support. Approach: The relevance of a public health model of bereavement support to palliative care services is presented. We draw on the National Ins...

This paper tests Stroebe and Schut's Dual Process Model of Bereavement using data from the Changing Lives of Older Couples (CLOC), a prospective study of 1,532 married persons over the age of 65. This analysis focused on a weighted sample of 104 widowers and 492 widows at six months, 18 months, and four years later. Bradburn's Affect Balance Scale was used as the dependent variable, and the ind...

Bereavement is experiencing a loss, particularly of a loved one, which leads to a natural cycle of grief that has recognized psychological stages. Even though bereavement does not fit the criteria for the biomedical model of disease, it is a medical problem as there is a resultant morbidity and increased mortality associated with the surviving intimates. A bereavement protocol, which could mini...

Theories of bereavement abound. The endeavour to understand this complex process has moved from intra-psychic explanations and stage theories to cognitive rationalizations and, most recently, process orientated explorations of bereavement. What has been missing in most of the literature to date is a detailed analysis of the context within which bereavement behaviours occur. This paper outlines ...

The provision of bereavement care is an important part of neonatal intensive care. This systematic review of the effectiveness of interventions to support families and facilitate emotional adjustment following the death of a baby suggests that, while these are largely appreciated by parents who have participated in research, there has been little rigorous evaluation of their effectiveness. This...

Background. Nurses who provide end of life and bereavement care to neonates and their families are potentially at risk for developing stress-related health problems. These health problems can negatively affect nurses' ability to care for their patients. Purpose. Nurses need to be knowledgeable about end of life and bereavement issues to provide quality care. This study sought to evaluate the ef...

Having a plausible life-event explanation for a person’s disordered symptoms leads clinicians to judge those symptoms to be less abnormal than if their cause was unknown (Ahn et al., 2003). Yet the American Psychiatric Association’s official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders formally states that only bereavementrelated life events should exclude a client from a diagnosis of ...

The death of a loved one is recognized as one of life's greatest stresses, with reports of increased mortality and morbidity for the surviving spouse or parent, especially in the early months of bereavement. The aim of this paper is to review the evidence to date to identify physiological changes in the early bereaved period, and evaluate the impact of bereavement interventions on such physiolo...

The field of suicide postvention remains relatively immature in terms of the current knowledge base. This manuscript examines the existing knowledge regarding suicide bereavement and describes the limitations of the suicide bereavement knowledge base using a critical review of the literature specifically relating to suicide bereavement published in the previous 10 years. Six limitations are ide...

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on risk and resilience factors impacting on parental bereavement outcomes following the death of a child with a life-limiting condition. Over the past few decades, bereavement research has focussed primarily on a risk-based approach. In light of advances in the literature on resilience, the authors propose a Risk and Resilience Model o...