Background: As our population ages and end-of-life needs increase, health services need to get creative in how we engage our community about their plans, values, and wishes at end-of-life. One creative approach is Death Café whereby thought-provoking, hilarious, and tear-jerking conversations are guaranteed and you won’t leave hungry.

 
Aim: The Sutherland Shire Death Café aimed to utilise a partnership approach to ignite community conversations about end-of-life and grief. The secondary aim was to explore opportunities for building a compassionate community in the Sutherland Shire.  

 

Method: After community discussions, a partnership between health, council, cemetery, and the community college emerged which brought with it diverse skills and resources to achieve the aims of the project. Local Death Café facilitators with a passion for end-of-life were recruited, trained, and formed part of the team. Throughout 2022, events were planned, promoted, hosted, and evaluated with overwhelming success. Lessons learnt included group norms and participant boundaries, facilitator flexibility and post café debrief.

 

Results: Sell-out events with 150 registrants resulting in approximately 130 people attending across three separate occasions. Evaluations were collected from 75 participants which explored a variety of themes from comfort, meeting needs, feelings about life & or death, and the reasons for attending. Compassionate community round table meetings followed by mapping the strengths and resources of the local community to generate solutions for a whole community approach to death, dying, caregiving, and bereavement.

 

Next Steps: The community college is applying for a grant for the continued delivery of Death Café including facilitator training which will enable the facilitator base to grow. The partnership will continue to work together to build community capacity through shared experience and education. Using a community development approach, the compassionate community group will continue to pursue its goal of making end-of-life care in the Sutherland Shire, everyone’s responsibility.