Edinburgh Napier University

  In May 2020 the Team making this request for funds were awarded £20,000 from the CSO Covid Rapid Research Programme, to deliver and evaluate the provision of online supportive conversations and reflective sessions (OSCaRS) with care home staff during the pandemic. This allowed us to provide 5 sessions to 2 cares homes between June and August 2020. We have assessed the feasibility of providing such support ‘online’ and evaluated the impact and benefit for the staff involved. We found online delivery to be feasible and acceptable. The OSCaRS sessions offered a safe space for staff to express their experiences, have them actively listened to, acknowledged, and understood better by their peers. This contributed to better team communication and cohesion and improved the understanding and confidence of non-nurse staff of the delivery of palliative and end of life care.
As care homes prepare for winter pressures and a second wave of COVI-19, there is a need for externally facilitated emotional wellbeing support and practice input on death/dying care. The provision of dedicated Reflective Death Debriefings can develop practice and help mitigate the lasting effects of the first wave of the pandemic. Reflective debriefing sessions following deaths in care homes are a way to help to support and empower care home staff, have an educative and communicative role across the care home, and help individuals increase self-awareness and confidence and help reduce anxiety .

This request for funds is to enable us to undertake three key activities over the next 6 months.
(1) continue this support to the 2 care homes in the pilot study and to roll out the service to a further five homes over the winter 20/21;
(2) work to raise awareness of the value of online Reflective Death Debriefing and develop a community of practitioners able to offer this support across Lothian
(3) continue our work to determine how to best deliver and evaluate the impact on staff and residents of the intervention over time.
This proposed final work strand offers a valuable opportunity to extend our knowledge of evidence based practice in this field. We will do this by developing a conceptual framework for Reflective Death Debriefings with care home staff. This framework will provide an empirical basis for further research best practice/QI work. The conceptual framework will be informed by learning from previous practice and research by J Hockley and our learning from the CSO project and (1) and (2) activities in this project. This will be synthesised and combined with new knowledge from three additional activities. (a) conducting a systematic scoping review of literature and (b) undertaking an in-depth analysis of the audio recordings of the ten sessions already carried to mine for insights and further learning and (c) work with up to 3 of the seven homes to pilot different evaluation approaches/tools.