4. What is the Welsh Government's policy on the provision of bereavement services? OAQ53536

I thank the Member for the question. Health boards are responsible for providing bereavement care and support for their population. The Welsh Government funds third sector organisations directly to enhance services for people who are bereaved.

Diolch. Forty per cent of the 33,000 people who die in Wales each year die in the community, 55 per cent in hospital. Although bereavement support following a child's death in paediatric intensive care units is referred to in the current Welsh Government delivery plan for the critically ill, the plan does not make reference to the importance of bereavement care for families where an adult has died following critical care. A significant proportion of bereavement support is provided by our charitable hospices in Wales, with some 2,300 families supported in 2017-18, but it's understood that families whose loved one dies in the acute setting after receiving intensive and critical care are missing out on the bereavement care they need through lack of signposting or availability. It's certainly a concern that's been raised with me by the adult hospices in north Wales, which also tell me that the health board had not consulted them on their palliative care plan. So, how is the Welsh Government working with NHS Wales, ensuring that every family experiencing bereavement has access to appropriate bereavement support, regardless of the setting or circumstances of their loved one's death? 

Well, I thank Mark Isherwood for that supplementary question and thank him as well for the work that he does as chair of the cross-party group on funerals and bereavement care, which gives us access to some of the information that helps us in developing the services that we provide in this area. Now, he will know, I'm sure, that the Welsh Government has recently commissioned a piece of work funded through the end-of-life care board, and that is a scoping study into the breadth of bereavement care services in Wales. The board has asked Marie Curie and Cardiff University to lead on that study. It begins by mapping existing support and then identifying areas where further services are needed. We can undertake to make sure that the points the Member has raised today are fed into that study.  

First Minister, the loss of a loved one to suicide is a uniquely devastating bereavement in my view, and yet support services for those bereaved by suicide are practically non-existent in Wales. Organisations like the Jacob Abraham Foundation are doing sterling work supporting families with not a penny of public funding. There is also a pattern I am seeing in my work, on both my committees, of statutory services increasingly looking to third sector organisations to provide services across the board in health and social care, but without stumping up the funding for those organisations involved. I'm aware of the mapping exercise that you've referred to, but that is going to take time. Will the First Minister commit to discussing the particular needs of those bereaved by suicide with the health Minister, with a view to taking urgent action in this area, which is particularly important given that it is a fact that those bereaved by suicide are themselves at much higher risk of dying by suicide?  

Those are important points, Llywydd, that the Member makes. To be bereaved by suicide does bring with it a whole set of additional issues that families who are left behind have to grapple with and themselves are often a cause of mental health concerns for those families themselves. So, I entirely recognise the points that the Member makes. Of course, the health service does work with a wide range of third sector organisations, and in some fields—and this is certainly one of them—it is often the case that families would rather be in touch with an organisation outside the more formal constraints of public services. And through Cruse Bereavement Care and through the Samaritans, we do provide assistance to the third sector in relation to suicide prevention and bereavement counselling, and the Minister has committed funding of £0.5 million a year to continue to support national and regional approaches to tackling suicide and self-harm prevention. The study that I mentioned, and I know the Member was aware of it—we've already decided that there will be a particular focus within the study on services to support those who have had a sudden unexplained death or a death by suicide of someone in their family or close to them. And, of course, I'm very happy to continue to discuss these matters with my colleague Vaughan Gething as that work matures.