Bereavement

There was no posting for a few weeks - I was disheartened when I could not access the site on two occaions but it was easy today - so I start again

Type into GOOGLE
BMC Palliative Care and bereavement - and you will find a link to the following article

Forte Amanda L, Hill, Malinda, Pazder Rachel, Feudtner Chris
Bereavement care interventions: a systematic review

The authors identified 74 relevant studies evaluating diverse treatments designed to ameliorate a variety of outcomes associated with bereavement. Other than efficacy for pharmacological treatment for bereavement-related depression, they could identify no consistent pattern of treatment benefit among the other forms of interventions.

Conclusions: Due to the small number of clinically controlled trials, no rigorous evidence-based recommendations regarding the treatment of bereaved persons is currently possible except for the pharmacologic treatment of depression. They postulate the following as impeding scientific progress regarding bereavement care interventions:
excessive theoretical heterogeneity,
stultifying between-study variation,
inadequate reporting of intervention procedures
few published replication studies
methodological flaws of study design.

Add that to the fact it is a difficult subject on which to do randomised control trials anyway and one can see there is still a long way to go to discover the most appropriate treatments - however, practicitoners do know that bereaved people, both adults and children, can be helped by interventions - the best ways have simply not been pinpointed.

This article come from the open access publisher BioMed. Look out for other full text artilces on palliative care on the site

Denise