What We Do

A Child Of Mine provides emotional and practical support to bereaved parents and families. We work in partnership with health care professionals to help improve care and support available when a child dies.

Family Support

A Child Of Mine offers confidential peer support, information, guidance and a listening ear to any family who has lost a child at any age or gestation, and from any circumstance.

Across Staffordshire we provide 1-2-1 emotional peer support, various peer group sessions, days out and small financial grants.

We also offer groups (Free of charge) for both younger and older bereaved children who have suffered the loss of a sibling.

Sunshine & Rainbows

A stay and play playgroup, for parents and their children born before or after loss. Offering a different entertainer each month, light lunch and craft activities.

Our Space

A space for young people to build confidence through humour and creative activities.

For any family outside of Staffordshire, we can provide telephone or email emotional support, and signposting to other local organisations and charities.

If you would like to know more about how we can help and support, please do not hesitate to contact our telephone helpline on 07803 751229.

Children’s Hospital’s Bereavement Network

A Child Of Mine also works closely with the bereavement teams at several of the major children’s hospitals across England – we sit on their own bereavement network as a parent representative which allows us to share experiences and work with the bereavement teams to improve care.

We provide several publications for families and our material is supported by Birmingham Children’s, Alder Hey, Bristol and Great Ormond Street hospitals and several of the hospitals within Barts Health NHS Trust.

We have also been involved in various projects across the trusts and participate in regular staff ‘when a child dies’ study days at Birmingham Children’s Hospital, where we share the experiences of a bereaved parent.

Child Death Review Process

We also work closely with the regional CDOP co-ordinators (Child Death Overview Panel), this is a mandatory review into every child’s death, looking at learning and preventable child deaths in the future. We sit on the West Midlands Regional Network group as a parent representative, and can help advise and work with them to improve care and process for families who have lost a child unexpectedly.

We are also honoured to have been a key stakeholder in a new booklet ‘When a child dies – a guide for parents which has been published by NHS England and will give information for parents around the child death review.

LeDeR

Learning from Lives and Deaths of People with a Learning Disability and autistic people

Research has shown that on average, people with a learning disability and autistic people die earlier than the general public, and do not receive the same quality of care as people without a learning disability or who are not autistic.

We want to change this. LeDeR reviews deaths to see where we can find areas of learning, opportunities to improve, and examples of excellent practice. This information is then used to improve services for people living with a learning disability and autistic people.

We are delighted that Gayle has been asked to chair the new Governance Panel for LeDeR so that we can make sure changes and improvement in care/services are made.

Training

We offer training to healthcare professionals or anyone working with bereaved parents. By providing tools to help support bereaved families we can increase the confidence of staff when working alongside them. For more information on how we can tailor training for your organisation please do not hesitate to contact us.

Contact.

We aim to respond to all emails within 48 hours but if you need more urgent assistance, please call our telephone helpline on 07803 751229 between 9am and 5pm.
Out of hours please leave a message and we will return your call as soon as possible.