Jacqui Eve, Bereavement Services Coordinator at St Margaret's describes her day and the difference she thinks St Margaret’s Hospice Care makes…
Tell us about your role, what do you do?
My role is to provide a bereavement service at St Margaret’s for relatives or carers of patients that have come under the umbrella of St Margaret’s. That could be patients who have not only been in the In-patient Unit (IPU) but patients who have died at home or in hospitals or in care homes under the care of our community teams.
Can you describe an average day for you?
Goodness, OK, it really depends on which day it is! I could be counselling a client or assessing a client who has contacted us or been referred for bereavement support.
I could be supervising members of our team, which consists of around 25 volunteers. I could be making condolence calls or managing the administration around a team of people and all that that entails.
Condolence calls are generally made in the first couple of weeks after the death, sometimes a lot sooner and we make those calls out of the blue so you don’t really know how that client is going to be. But the feedback we have is great, people don’t have a bad word to say about St Margaret’s. They have already had the most wonderful experience so we’re in a privileged position because we’re going in off the back of that, so its always positive.
How many people do you think go on to have bereavement support from our service and how has that grown during the last 12 months due to Covid-19?
It’s difficult to quantify that as a percentage but what we do know in bereavement generally is that if you looked at 100 people 20% might need some support and then out of those 20% maybe 5% might need counselling.
I would say that what has happened in this last year is clients are coming to us a lot earlier for support. In 2019 we would have made condolence calls that generally wouldn’t have led to any support. People would be happy to say – ‘I’ll wait and see what happens, I’ll wait and see how I am’ but what we are finding now is that more and more of those early calls are leading to some sort of support.
What difference do you think your service makes?
Our support is not time limited so clients come into our service and some of them for a matter of months, some might continue with our support for years. It great to see the impact of the support we give no matter how long we are supporting a client. Our support gives people a sense of hope for the future where they will be able to live with their grief. The grief doesn’t disappear but what they find is that the grief becomes part of their life and not all of their life.
How has Covid-19 changed the way that you can offer your support?
Well back in 2019 we were offering two levels of support, telephone support or face to face counselling. But since the beginning of the pandemic we’re now in the position where we can offer telephone support and telephone, online and face-to-face counselling. We are hoping that towards the end of 2021 we can start to reintroduce face to face counselling.
In the past there have been times when we haven’t been able to offer the support we would have liked to due to where the client lived, lack of public transport, or disability, the development of our online and telephone counselling means we are able to accommodate more people.
Although it’s been a challenging time for everyone, technology means we can increase the number of people we support.
Why do you love working at St Margaret’s?
I don’t think I’ve ever worked somewhere where I can honestly say it’s a team mentality. Different teams are happy to share their knowledge and work together and the support from colleagues is amazing and more so than anywhere I have ever worked. A real cohesive, joined up organisation is what I can see.