Family Support Team

Shooting Star Children’s Hospices Family Support Team provide a vital role, making it possible for each family to receive a truly individualised pathway of care. They act as a family’s dedicated point of contact and ensure we initiate immediate support as and when this is needed. Through this team, every supported, end-of-life and bereaved family has access to a huge breadth of holistic care services, to help them as a family.

The team consists of family support workers, arts therapists, trauma therapists, complementary therapists, counsellors, social workers, transition team, and an events team. They provide vital wrap-around support to families and continue to do so for three years and three months following the death of their baby, child or young person.

In November, this team launched a new specialist bereavement service to families who experience the sudden, and often unimaginably tragic death of their child. Since its launch, 60 families have been referred to the service, who otherwise wouldn’t have had specialist bereavement support. Bespoke care plans are made, including specialist grief and trauma-focused therapeutic interventions from our highly skilled therapists and counsellors, trained in multimodal approaches including complementary therapies, holistic counselling, EMDR, trauma informed CBT and arts therapies.