Dorit Braun

Dorit retired from paid work in 2019. She provides some mentoring to senior managers and trustees of charities, and is the Independent chair of the Parenting Programmes Alliance. Following a very traumatic family bereavement Dorit is active in trying to improve mental health care and the ways NHS staff and organisations learn from deaths. She is on the UCH Learning from Deaths research programme steering group, and in this capacity has edited manuscripts for publication, she is on the AvMa participation group, and has provided training to NHS trusts and other professionals by speaking about her family's experiences and. Dorit has also written a blog for the Patient Safety website. Dorit is also an artist, exhibiting from time to time.

Life Beyond the Cubicle Project: Piloting of Resources

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Making Families Count invites Expressions of Interest from NHS Trusts to pilot eLearning modules and group-based resources in Jan/Feb 2024.  Trusts taking part in the pilot will be expected to work with the external evaluator for the project, to assist in the collection of monitoring data and also to demonstrate how the pilot fits with the Trusts’ Quality Improvement work. There is no charge to take part.   The Life Beyond the Cubicle learning resources have been developed by Making Families Count, in partnership with Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, funded by NHS England.  The resources aim to educate and update staff on the importance of …

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Suicide without ideation 

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To prevent such deaths requires health professionals to take a broader view of risk than ideation. This is also true for tragic homicides by people with acute mental illness. Health professionals need to listen attentively to the concerns of family members, and/or friends.

Getting involved: contributing lived experience to research

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I applied to join the Learning from Deaths: Learning and Action research Public and Relatives Steering Group in the hope that our family’s dreadful experience might be put to some good use. We don’t want other families to have to go through what we have suffered. I also knew that meeting other people who’d had harrowing experiences might be helpful to me because it might reduce my sense of isolation. The Steering Group was set up by the main researcher on the project, Dr Zoe Brummell, Anaesthetic and Intensive Care Trainee at University College London NHS Trust. The aim of …

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Inquest – a family’s perspective

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My much loved daughter in law Mariana Pinto died, aged 32, on 16 October 2016.  The Coroner, issued a narrative verdict at the end of the inquest, on 13 March 2017:   “Mariana Pinto died on Sunday, 16 October 2016, when she stepped over the balcony of her home, fell from the third floor, and after some minutes rolled off the glass roof on which she had landed to the ground below. Her actions were deliberate, but she did not have the understanding necessary to categorise these as suicide.  She was in a confused state with features of psychosis.  This was …

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Family knowledge in a mental health crisis: Dorit Braun

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I’ve had a few experiences of a loved one having some kind of breakdown or mental health crisis. What I have learnt is that the process of assessing a person in crisis takes very little, if any, account of the knowledge of the person’s loved ones/family/carers. The mental health crises that I have witnessed involved a person losing their mind and becoming psychotic. If you read about psychosis from people who have experienced it and survived, it is clearly absolutely terrifying. It can feel to them like everything in the world is directed at them – e.g. the TV speaks …

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