Case study:

11 May 2010

Bereavement and donor support team at Bolton Hospitals Trust

---

Key points

---

Bolton Hospitals Trust’s bereavement and donor support team has helped to boost the number of organ and tissue donations over the last three years by offering support to relatives and staff in the immediate aftermath of a patient’s death.

The team, which has been operating since October 2004, ensures all families are offered religious and spiritual support following a bereavement as well as the option of organ or tissue donation.

The result is that organ donation is now viewed as normal practice by both staff and patients and their families.

In fact because of the dramatic increase in the number of full tissue donors this service has now, with the families’ consent, been transferred to the dedicated facility in Speke, Liverpool.

The aim of the service is to offer immediate bereavement support and to ensure that all patient choices made in life – such as wishes for spiritual care and decisions about organ donation – are respected and implemented in a timely, empathetic manner at the time of death.

The service, which is jointly funded by Bolton Hospital NHS Trust and UKTransplant, promotes best practice in bereavement care, modelling itself on the Department of Health’s guidelines When a patient dies, Saving lives valuing donors and the Human Tissue Act 2004.

Consisting of two full-time and two part-time staff, it is also responsible for:

Education in bereavement and donation

Providing support for relatives and staff at the time of bereavement

Audit, review and updating of practice policies

On call corneal retrieval team to meet the increase in number of corneal donors.

At first the team encountered some resistance to their work from staff who feared families’ grief would be heightened if they were approached for donation.

But in fact the opposite has happened with the idea of donating an organ or tissue being seen as the only positive to come from a tragic situation.

A trust-wide link nurse system has helped give staff the confidence to approach newly bereaved families to establish the deceased’s wishes.

In excess of 500 staff have now attended the monthly study days on the subject.

We have a Trust statement in support of this initiative and now believe this should be mandatory for all staff.

It is hoped the service will eventually operate 24 hours a day.

Donation is now seen as normal practice at the hospital.

This in turn means the wishes of dying patients are fully respected.

---

Back to top