Shooting Star hosts UK’s first National Child Death Summit
Shooting Star hosted the UK’s first National Child Death Summit, to raise awareness of the critical gaps in bereavement care for families grieving the death of a child. Our summit, held on Tuesday 30 September, convened 79 organisations, including 34 children’s hospices, healthcare professionals, child death review teams, bereaved parents, and national experts calling for equitable, specialist bereavement care across the country.
Our summit highlighted the deep inequalities in support available to families following the death of a child, with a warning of a ‘postcode lottery’ in bereavement care, due to the absence of national policy and sustainable funding.
During the day we were able to showcase our award-winning model of specialist, trauma-informed bereavement care. This specialist bereavement support, was accessed by 448 bereaved families in 2024/25, marking a 74% rise on the previous year, underscoring the growing demand for expert support following the loss of a child.
The day was filled with powerful testimonies from bereaved parents, expert panels, and healthcare practitioners, painting a stark picture of the consequences when bereavement care is unavailable, delayed, or inconsistent. This video, presented at the summit, detailed how our specialist bereavement service offers a unique model of care, designed to support every family through the unimaginable. This model can be adapted by other organisations, and by working together, organisations across the UK can change the national conversation child death and bereavement support.
Sarah Hodkinson, Head of Psychosocial Services, shares: “We have always provided much-needed specialist bereavement care to families of children with life-limiting conditions, knowing the deep and life-long impact the death of a child brings. We recognised that many families in our neighbourhoods were facing the sudden and traumatic death of their child, but didn’t have the same access to the care they needed. For us, this was a health inequality that couldn’t be ignored. Through growing our Specialist Bereavement Service, we have opened our doors to 200 additional families, quadrupling the number of families we support.
“At the summit, a mum and dad shared the profound difference our care has made to their family, and to their individual health and mental wellbeing. The summit proved to be a deeply important moment in time, where children’s hospices across the UK came together to agree that we can and need to do more to break down barriers in access to children’s hospice care, and our Specialist Bereavement Service has shown how this is possible.”
An attendee at the summit left this feedback: “The summit was one of the most impactful events I have been to: a perfect balance of practice, parent-testimony, research and vision.”
The summit’s collective call to action was unambiguous: bereavement care must be recognised as an essential part of the UK’s healthcare system, embedded in national policy and supported with multi-year, sustainable funding.
Find out more about our bereavement services, and if you would like to support our work and help ensure no family faces the death of a child alone, please consider donating today.
