Background After death care (ADC) refers to the time immediately after the death of a baby, child or young person (BCYP) and management of this significantly impacts the bereavement journey for families. Birmingham in the United Kingdom has the highest Muslim population in the country, a cohort for whom swift burial after death represents culturally appropriate after death care. This has highlighted for local bereavement and paediatric palliative care services the need for processes that support this, and the need to understand the issues families can face in achieving this goal.

Objectives Our service commenced routine recording of novel data in after death care to understand our service’s ability to achieve cultural goals. Further aims with provision of grant funding due shortly include hosting local Muslim leaders to understand if this measure is of relevance, feedback findings and review if any other outcomes would be useful.

Methods Birmingham Children’s Hospital (BCH) is a large children’s hospital servicing the West Midlands (population around 6 million) with 378 beds including the largest PICU in the country. BCH bereavement and palliative care service collected time to hospital release of all deceased BCYP from 1 August 2023 to 29 February 2024, and this was effectively imbedded into ongoing hospital bereavement data collection.

Results We collected complete data for 59 of 61 deaths that occurred in the review period. The average time to release from BCH was 5.6 days with 24% released same or next day, and 51% released within four days. A coroner referral caused delays with average 7.7 days (1.8 days without referral) to release, only 3% release same or next day (62%) and 29% released within 4 days (90%). Outcomes from our engagement events will be available at the time of presentation.

Discussion It is essential data and standards are relevant to the communities we serve. Based on experiences supporting Muslim families in Birmingham we added an ADC measure to review time to hospital release of a body. Our initial data outlines the average time to release for a large hospital in the UK for the first time (that has been published). This shows what we interpret to be 62% of deaths achieving an average processing time meeting cultural goals but that unnecessary coroner referrals could potentially cause harm.We hope to engage with the local Muslim community on outcome relevance and to share our findings. We hope that this is an outcome measure that can be used to compare services, observe changes when processes change and so delineate barriers and facilitators.