The development of journeys that capture the lived experience of people bereaved

Tender description

This commission comes from the NHS Wales Health Collaborative, which hosts the National Coordinator role for suicide and self-harm prevention for Wales. A task and finish sub-group of the multi-agency National Advisory Group for suicide and self-harm prevention in Wales will be overseeing the progress and outcomes from the work. The assignment is about how we support people who have lost someone close to them following a death by suicide. As a shorthand, this support is often referred to as a ‘bereavement pathway’ but we know that because suicide deaths are infrequent and exceptional events, there could be as many ‘pathways’ as there are bereavements. We would like to commission a listening exercise, engaging people with lived experience in Wales, to try to determine what their individual ‘journeys’ have been following a death by suicide. We would like to know what support they were offered (if any), when and where, what did and didn’t work for them, and what they would wish to be in place for others, or what they would have liked to have had in place for themselves, at various points in their journey. It would be for them to identify what kind of support they felt they needed (eg: emotional, practical, advocacy or a combination). This work also presents an opportunity to elicit feedback on the ‘Help is at Hand’ leaflet that is widely recommended across the UK as a key resource to be offered to the bereaved, and which participants may or may not have received.