OxCSWell Research

Bereavement by suicide

Following the award of a grant by the Sir Halley Stewart Trust, a research assistant was appointed and began work in October 2024 on a project investigating the impact of spirituality and religion on bereavement by suicide.

The project team consists of Andrew Williams, Head of Spiritual and Pastoral Care at Oxford Health, Karen Lascelles, Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes and former Nurse Consultant for Suicide Prevention at Oxford Health (Principal Investigator), and research assistant Madhusree Dasgupta.

Ethics approval was gained from Oxford Brookes University in the Spring of 2025, following which a research advisory group and a PPI (patient and public involvement) group were appointed. The research advisory group consists of academics and researchers with an expertise in suicide-related research in the UK, Europe and Africa, as well as practitioners in both clinical work and spiritual and pastoral care.

The project is expected to be completed in the Autumn of 2026.

The LiSHoRe project

LiSHoRe was OxCSWell’s first major research project.

The LiSHoRe Project – which stands for Listen, Share, Hold, Respond – is a study that investigated ethnically diverse NHS staff and their experiences of spirituality during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The research project has been completed, and the results reported to NHS England/Improvement, who funded the project. You can read about the findings in the report summary and in an open access article published in the BMJ in 2023 (Gill HK, Chastney J, Patel R, et al. ‘I never leave my house without praying’: a qualitative exploration of the psychospiritual experiences of ethnically diverse healthcare staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. BMJ Open 2023 13-4. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2022-070409).

Themes from the research discussion groups informed the topics for a series of webinars held during 2021-2022.