The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the impact work can have on healthcare workers and the importance of staff support services. Rapid guidance was published to encourage preventive and responsive support for healthcare workers.

To understand mental healthcare staff's help-seeking behaviours and access to support at work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to inform iterative improvements to provision of staff support.

We conducted a formative appraisal of access to support and support needs of staff in a National Health Service mental health trust. This involved 11 semi-structured individual interviews using a topic guide. Five virtual staff forums were additional sources of data. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to identify key themes.

Peer-based, within-team support was highly valued and sought after. However, access to support was negatively affected by work pressures, physical distancing and perceived cultural barriers.

Healthcare organisations need to help colleagues to support each other by facilitating open, diverse workplace cultures and providing easily accessible, safe and reflective spaces. Future research should evaluate support in the evolving work contexts imposed by COVID-19 to inform interventions that account for differences across healthcare workforces.

Patients often do not eat/drink enough during hospitalization. To enable patients to meet their energy and nutritional requirements, food and catering service quality and staff support are therefore important. We assessed patients’ satisfaction with hospital food and investigated aspects influencing it.

We conducted a cross-sectional study collecting patients’ preferences using a slightly modified version of the Acute Care Hospital Foodservice Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire (ACHFPSQ). Factor analysis was carried out to reduce the number of food-quality and staff-issue variables. Univariate and multivariate ordinal categorical regression models were used to assess the association between food quality, staff issues, patients’ characteristics, hospital recovery aspects and overall foodservice satisfaction (OS).

A university hospital in Florence, Italy, in the period November–December 2009.

Hospital patients aged 18+ years (n 927).

Of the 1288 questionnaires distributed, 927 were returned completely or partially filled in by patients and 603 were considered eligible for analysis. Four factors (explained variance 64·3 %, Cronbach's alpha αC = 0.856), i.e. food quality (FQ; αC = 0·74), meal service quality (MSQ; αC = 0·73), hunger and quantity (HQ; αC = 0·74) and staff/service issues (SI; αC = 0·65), were extracted from seventeen items. Items investigating staff/service issues were the most positively rated while certain items investigating food quality were the least positively rated. After ordinal multiple regression analysis, OS was only significantly associated with the four factors: FQ, MSQ, HQ and SI (OR = 17·2, 6·16, 3·09 and 1·75, respectively, P < 0·001), and gender (OR = 1·53, P = 0·024).

The most positively scored aspects of foodservice concerned staff/service, whereas food quality was considered less positive. The aspects that most influenced patients’ satisfaction were those related to food quality.

This article is a literature report on grief issues for health care professionals, undertaken to identify Japanese nurses' grief experience when they work in palliative care units. Health care professionals' grief experience and its impact have not been well understood or identified as a significant issue in Japan.

Published articles relating to this study were searched using electronic catalogues such as CINAHL and PsycINFO, books, and research publications. Key words used for the search were “grief,” “palliative care,” “nurse,” “staff support,” and “Japan.” Both English and Japanese were used for the literature search in order to collect information regarding nurses' grief and support systems in Japan and elsewhere. The literature search covered the period 1990–2006 inclusive.

This article explores these issues in the literature as preparation for establishing a study that will particularly look at the influence of nurses' grief on the quality of care provided.

Consideration of Japanese culture as it relates to death and dying and to nursing culture is a significant part of this work.