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When caring ends: Understanding and supporting informal care trajectories

This project provides new insights into how carers navigate life beyond their caring responsibilities, as well as how such trajectories are shaped by institutional structures, norms, and social dynamics. We seek to better understand how, why, when, and for whom caring ends, including the socio-cultural and relational factors that shape experiences before, during, and after caring.

Dying-in-delay: Understanding the implications of pandemic delays for/at the end of life

This project is supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP240101775) and is led by Prof Emma Kirby and A/Prof John MacArtney (University of Warwick, UK). This research aims to understand the implications of pandemic-related delays for dying and bereavement, including the social and cultural factors that shape experiences of illness and care. The findings will contribute to improvements in health and social policies, ensuring better support for those facing serious illness and their loved ones. In doing so, we apply a sociological lens to unpack issues of timeliness and delay, to reveal how objective conditions and subjective experiences shape access to and experiences in healthcare. This includes a focus on the socio-political contexts within which individuals, families, communities, and systems operate, to understand inequalities and inequities alongside constructions of responsibility, risk, suffering, and blame.

Family members’ experiences of trauma and grief support

This research investigates the experiences of support provided by a pilot Trauma and Grief Support Service offered to customers of Allianz Australia, following the death or severe injury of a family member.

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Family Members’ Experiences of Accessing Coronial Case Files in NSW

Coronial case files are kept for all ‘unnatural’ deaths reported to a coroner in Australia. An increasing number of family members’ request to access information contained in the Coronial case file pertaining to the death of their relative. In some Australian states, social workers attached to the coroner’s office or forensic medicine have, over time, developed support to family members who are approved by a coroner to access reports and, in some circumstances, scene photographs and video footage. However, how families experience an unnatural death of a relative or friend and navigate systems and services related to this death, remains poorly understood. This research provides an opportunity to advance understandings of family experiences of accessing Coronial case files, including various documents, photographs, or other images or footage.

Exploring connection and comfort in palliative care

This research explores the accounts of patients and families in palliative care, alongside views of staff and volunteers, to better understand what matters to people in palliative care. Experiences of hospitalisation can mean that patients and families feel disconnected; patients may experience a lack of comfort when in hospital, in the absence of familiar people, places, and things. How patients, families, and staff understand comfort or discomfort, including being and feeling comfortable and the practices or accomplishment of comforting, is central to the practice and philosophy of palliative care.