Suicide as a result of domestic abuse
Between four and ten women take their own lives each week in the UK because of domestic abuse. For families this is a dark, lonely and challenging place.
Blog
Complaints are Gold
Many families report that they are afraid to raise concerns and complaints. They worry that doing so will have a negative impact on the support that their loved one receives, or that they will be further alienated from being involved in their loved ones lives. This has to change!
What can one person do to achieve change?
Many years ago, as a young woman, I also wanted to change the world. I wanted the inequalities within and between countries to be reduced.
Why and how I set up the Adam Bojelian Foundation CIC (#AdsFoundation)
He also spent half his life in hospitals in seven different NHS regions of the United Kingdom. Adam experienced the absolute best and the very worst of NHS care.
Family Liaison Officers – the future of Family Support after NHS Incidents?
Like so many organisations, over the last year we’ve had to adjust to running on-line webinars, instead of face-to-face training. We learned a lot from our face-to-face training and now we’re using that knowledge in our webinars. In our old style training we travelled all over England, running all day training sessions for up to 150 heath care staff members (very often NHS Trusts) from all levels, from CEO and Governors to staff who worked in A&E, Maternity and Wards. With staff who worked in Mental Health, staff who worked with elderly people, with children, with people with Learning Disabilities …
Working to improve mental health services
The lead psychiatrist for the mental health trust phoned me. She was thoughtful, reflective and kind. I felt that she and her team were trying to reflect and learn.
Getting involved: contributing lived experience to research
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 …
Making Sense of COVID-19: Sharing Family Experiences of Shielding to Influence Services
I know others have had much harder times than us. The lockdown and shielding made us painfully aware of families who have loved ones who have already had the freedom to meet up and share their lives taken away from them in other ways.
Inquest – a family’s perspective
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 …
Using positive engagement to fill in the gaps
Last week I met a lovely young woman whose brother had died from a brain tumour 10 months earlier. She felt that she could tell me about this because I met her in a work capacity and she had already listened to me talking about grief and my own struggles to find a way through traumatic bereavement. As we talked, she opened up a bit more and started telling me how she was feeling. I haven’t been able to get the conversation out of my head and the more I thought about it, the more I felt the need to …