Our mission is to deliver real and lasting impact on practice, policy, commissioning and research. Through our work with the Strategic Partnership for Sudden Child Death and wider collaborators, we are translating evidence into change - improving how systems respond after sudden death, and how families are supported to live with their loss.
QUINTET research programme
Sudden and unexpected deaths in children and young people are traumatic, but families rarely have access to the care and support they need. We know that there is variation in the care and support that families receive, with many receiving no help at all. QUINTET gathers evidence to understand how to best support families and professionals.
Ways to get involved
Voicing the Void research project
When a child dies, parents often describe the experience as “screaming into the void” - a grief so profound that words fail. Bereaved parents can feel isolated and unseen, surrounded by people unsure how to talk about their loss. Unlike “widow” or “orphan,” there is no word for a parent whose child has died - a silence that reflects society’s struggle to face this loss.
Voicing the Void is a creative project bringing together bereaved parents, poets, artists, and academics across disciplines to explore this silence and give it language.
Through poetry, prose, and collaboration, we aim to create a word that honours this experience and helps parents express their grief. The project unites partners from universities, hospices, charities, and the arts to change how we understand and talk about child loss. Parents, poets and academics are working behind the scenes to develop a series of prototype new words (neologisms) and we will share these here, ready for an upcoming national vote.