• Staff need to be resourced, supported and enabled to offer people this valuable time. • Healthcare staff must know how to use everyday language, avoid medical jargon, and take time to ensure that people have understood what they have been told. • If bad news has been given, healthcare staff should be enabled to have the time to check back with people in subsequent days to see if there are follow-up questions. 2) Facilitate bereavement support to be offered proactively with particular attention paid to older bereaved people, who are at heightened risk of social isolation. • Health and social care professionals, across all care settings, should be provided with the training, time, and tools to enable them to signpost quickly and appropriately to support services that can provide practical information to people on what to do following a death. • A cross-departmental, public health approach to bereavement should be adopted which identifies people’s needs and maps out the appropriate informal, community, organised and professional responses which are needed. • Communities should be empowered to provide responsive bereavement supports to older people, particularly those that are at risk of social isolation. • As per the National Adult Palliative Care Policy, bereavement support should be considered an essential extension in the delivery of palliative care. • All organisations, who have supported an older person who has died, should consider how they continue to support bereaved loved ones following the person’s death. • Investment is needed to enable health and social care professionals have access to bereavement support that acknowledges they themselves will have ongoing personal and professional grief to deal with in their workplace. Support 3) Guarantee access to out-of-hours GP and community nursing services for all older people, regardless of geography, finances, care setting or diagnosis. • As noted in the Programme for Government, additional support is needed for GP practices in rural areas and areas of increased need. 4) Increase the number of GP practice teams in primary care services. There is a national shortage of GPs, resulting in longer waiting times for patients. Increased capacity will strengthen the delivery of community-based health services, ensuring timely access to care, reducing over-reliance on hospital services, and facilitating greater coordination of care.
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Telling It Like It Is
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