Creative Innovation Winner - Child and Family Service at St Columba's Hospice Care
Creative Innovation Winner - Child and Family Service at St Columba's Hospice Care
Our Child and Family Service at St Columba’s Hospice Care which began in 2019 provides information, support (1:1 / group) and signposting to children and young people under 18 who either have an adult family member living with an incurable illness (e.g. incurable cancer, MND) or who have been bereaved as a result of incurable illness. Part of the wider Family Support Team, the service covers Edinburgh and the Lothians (West Lothian, East Lothian, and Midlothian). Support is offered face-to-face either in our family supports rooms in the hospice, in school or in the community, online via NHS NearMe / AttendAnywhere or by telephone, as appropriate. Our child and family practitioners help parents and caregivers talk to their children about illness/diagnosis and death and dying and provide resources to support this. We support families with children and young people’s emotional needs both before and following a death and advocate for their voices andneeds to be heard and included.
We are working hard to extend our support out into the community and this includes growing our connections with schools. To date we have worked with a number of schools delivering projects about grief, loss and change and this work has included training/education sessions for all staff on Childhood Grief. In addition to the support we provide for patients and families, we are working hard to increase awareness of the support we offer and extend our reach by offering different activities and opportunities for people to come together, to talk, connect, reflect, remember and share grief through events such as Children’s Grief Awareness Week, Demystifying Death Week and To Absent Friends.
Here we share some insights into the schools projects we have delivered.
As part of our songwriting for loss and change projects we work on with our friends at Fischy Music, we expanded this and took it international. We collaborated with George Heriots School here in Edinburgh alongside some of our hospice patients and joined Elliniki Paideia High School and Galilee hospice in Geece. The ‘GRESCO Agape’ project included highlighting the work of hospices, helping to reduce anxieties, fears and myths around death and dying. Through cross-cultural exchange, the project sought to promote culturally-sensitive responses to grief and loss, and provided participants with a safe environment for authentic expression and mutual growth. Implemented during, and in response to, the Covid-19 pandemic, this project adopted a telehealth approach, and all sessions took place via online video conferencing. School students joined from their classroom environments accordingly and many Greek patients joined from the day care center of Galilee. All other participants and the facilitators took part from their own environments. There are plans to deliver this project again due to its success.
Our two latest collaborations are with Musselburgh Grammar in East Lothian and Victoria Primary School in Edinburgh.
Our high school project is a collaboration with colleagues from MYPAS (Midlothian’s Young People’s Advice Service) called “Walk a Mile in Mine”…. This project also includes a Grief Awareness session for around 80 staff. The awareness sessions aim to increase the knowledge and confidence in staff regarding childhood grief and bereavement so that not only the children and young people in the groups are benefitting but the support will cascade throughout the school environment allowing others facing bereavement or who are bereaved be supported too due to the enhanced understanding.
The idea behind this project is to help young people explore and express how to convey to others how it might feel to walk a mile in their shoes, to better understand them and to be able to support them and their needs. Over a six week period the young people used therapeutic grief activities to help them understand Grief and they then designed their shoes as a way of sharing their story. The shoes will go on display in our hospice as part of Demystifying Death Week. The young people are incredibly proud of their shoes and felt like the group helped support them in their grief. We will be working with other High Schools over the coming year to deliver this opportunity to other young people too.
“my shoes are quite chaotic- they resemble my grief, not a straight road and it swerves, it’s different for each person. It’s like you feel things get too much and overwhelming and it can feel like it’s flooding your soul. It keeps building until it overflows. Thunder and lightning is the grief I feel that’s always there – the colours are light where I try not to only be in my grief and provides distraction. The shoe on top show life tinged with some splodges before my mum died and the bottom shoe is my everyday life now”. Erin (aged 17)
The second project is a collaboration between ourselves and Victoria Primary School and we are working with P6 to learn about the Bereavement Charter for Children, Young People and Adults in Scotland and to work with them to create a local school charter. A draft “Bereavement Friendly schools project” underpins this and will include creating criteria for a charter mark that might be used with other schools helping them also to become a bereavement friendly school. This has been drafted by colleagues from the writing group for the Bereavement Charter. The project will include a staff education session for all school staff and a project across the entirety of the school community starting at nursery, identifying a story book in relation to loss/change/grief suitable to age and development and a creative project for each school class supporting and encouraging conversation about this subject, helping to normalise grief and promote conversation and support across the school community. This project runs up to the summer so we will share the outcomes following this. We hope to share this project within education across Scotland making grief education a part of the curriculum in every school ensuring that children and young people facing bereavement or who are bereaved have the support they need.
The group work and collaborations are a wonderful addition to the support we are able to provide to young people and their families. Our service continues to grow and we are delighted to be able to provide support for so many families and the enhancement of our schools projects means we are able to support grief awareness to reach far wider, meaning more people are able to benefit from support.
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