ACT government cut funding to Canberra's on-scene trauma support service last year

Over 10 years in operation, the service attended at least 520 scenes of sudden and unexpected deaths in Canberra - including car crashes, hospital-related deaths, suicides and drug overdoses - before the government pulled its funding weeks before last year's election.

In that time, Supportlink's ACT Trauma Support Service lent practical help to more than 2500 Canberrans; families who lost loved ones and witnesses to scenes of death who may have also suffered trauma from the experience.

From 2006 to 2015, the service operated on volunteers alone, until it secured about $50,000 a year for two years from government, covering about half its costs.

Yet despite months of lobbying ministers for just $150,000 a year last year to fully cover their costs, those pleas fell on deaf ears.

Supportlink executive director Donna Evans said the service had been a key go-between for police and families of the deceased at the scene, and their support to families and witnesses extended into the months and years after a death.

"Whether that's sitting in the gutter in the middle of the night for four hours holding a box of tissues, waiting for things to happen, or just checking in on people's different responses to the trauma," she said.

"We were also doing risk assessments of people in the middle of that trauma, so you need a certain amount of skill to be able to identify what is the grief and where that risk might be greater, you have a duty of care for people."

Mrs Evans said staff helped families with everything from advice on accessing a loved one's Medicare records and helping organise funerals to explaining the coronial inquest process and police procedures.

"The police were also really supportive of the work we were doing; at the scene, they really have a job to do which is about gathering facts and assembling a report for the Coroner," she said.

"So they were really happy that we were there, on call for every case at whatever time of the night, to help support the families, which really is outside their strict policing role at the scene."

The funding cut has left families who may have since unexpectedly lost a loved one without immediate support to negotiate not only the trauma and grief of their loss, but also the often complex and confusing police and coronial systems.

"From a department perspective, I think they feel there is a service being delivered, but being a therapeutic counselling service it was to complement the work we did on the frontline, it certainly wasn't to replace the work we did at the trauma support service," Mrs Evans said.

An ACT government spokesman said the government was grateful for their services, but it now funds a free Relationship Australia counselling service "to anyone affected by a death being investigated by the ACT Coroners Court".

That service was recommended by the Coroner's Court, as ACT was the only jurisdiction without such a service at the time.

But the judiciary's recommendation was contingent on the government also keeping the trauma support service running, as the counselling service does not provide support at the scene, is voluntary and operates only during office hours.

The spokesman said the government remained "committed to supporting those affected by sudden and unexpected death" and there were also "a range of other free national support services and local privately run grief and loss counselling services available".

Supportlink's wellbeing worker Amelia Ishikawa said one case she attended involved a diabetic man whose wife had died the previous day, and in his grief he had forgotten to take his insulin, but noone at the scene had noticed until she did.

"We just hope that the gap is being filled somehow, because it's quite wrenching to not be able to attend anymore, but to know that those coronial events are still happening," she said