HOW could they? How could the Malaysian authorities be so brutal as to deliver a death message by text?

For 17 days the world watched as the conspiracy theories unfolded about the plight of Flight MH370. As the days trudged by and the angst of the families grew, I think pretty much all of us following the story felt that the 239 people on board were dead.

But to have it confirmed in a bald text message that essentially ordered the distraught families they would ‘have to assume beyond all reasonable doubt’ that no one on board had survived defies all that has been learned in recent years about how we deal with that life-changing moment when people learn they are bereaved.

Anyone who has been on the receiving end of a death message – whether it be delivered by a police officer at the door, an army officer relaying news of death in combat, or hospital doctor informing that nothing more could be done - will tell you that the moment of the telling was the most traumatic of their lives.

Experience has shown – some of it good, a lot of it bad – that how such news is delivered has a profound effect on the way a dead person is remembered and the way that those who survive them manage to heal.

In the year up to June 2013, 1,730 people were killed in accidents on Britain’s roads. Since 2001, a total of 448 members of the UK’s armed forces have lost their lives in Afghanistan. During 2011, the latest year for which figures are available, 159,178 people in this country died from cancer.

Behind every single one of those deaths was a family that needed to be informed and someone whose job it was to tell them. And devastating as it undoubtedly is to receive such bad news, the bearer of it will tell you it’s the most difficult and traumatic part of their job.

But hiding behind a text message to tell people their loved one is dead – and written in English at that, when the majority of relatives of those on Flight MH370 are Chinese – has to be at the front end of the text book on how not to do it.

Several other examples abound of what not to do. Shoving a note through the letterbox for one, or getting the victim’s name wrong – a thing so easily done in life but totally unforgivable in death. Not having cast iron processes in place so that hapless families see the death of their loved one reported on television first, or reading about it on a school’s internet message board as happened to one family whose son was knocked down outside the playground gates. Being told in an impersonal phone call by a disembodied voice from a foreign country that your husband has dropped dead on a business trip. Or being greeted on your arrival in Bahrain by British diplomats dressed in shorts and flip-flops for them to tell you how your loved one has died in a boat disaster.

And telling someone that their relative has ‘passed on,’ is ‘no longer with us,’ or is ‘lost’ is doubly confusing and distressing to someone desperately trying to take in the most appalling knowledge they are ever likely to face.

Keeping bereaved families informed is a crucial aspect of dealing with bereavement because not to do so simply exacerbates a family’s pain. Lobbing in the grenade and then walking away is every bit as bad as not getting right the manner of the telling in the first place.

Helping people through the investigation and judicial process – whether it be an inquest, public inquiry, prosecution, or litigation – is every bit as important as the moments after that first knock on the door or invitation to sit in a hospital’s family room.

Doing much of this are British police service family liaison officers who are now widely recognised to be among the best in their field across the world. It wasn’t always so – how the police failed to look after Stephen Lawrence’s family in the 1990s was a key finding of the ground-breaking 1999 Macpherson Report, and since then the role of family liaison officer has become a critical pivot in any police investigation into a sudden or unexpected death.

The Malaysians could no worse than spend a bit of time here to watch and learn. And turn off their mobile phones while they do so…

Sue Nelson is Vice Chair of the Emergency Planning Society’s Human Aspects group and has worked with bereaved families from high profile rail crashes, including Great Heck, near Selby in 2001.