The Grief-Sensitive Healthcare Project

With the support of the New York Life Foundation, the Yale Child Study Center (YCSC) aims to fill the gap that exists in understanding the impact of grief and loss on families and healthcare professionals through the Grief-Sensitive Healthcare Project (GSHP), providing educational trainings, workshops, presentations and resources about the many ways grief can be experienced and expressed in families. The project offers these training opportunities in-person and virtually to healthcare providers who may work with grieving families.

In exploring education and training across healthcare specialties, we have identified that while there is increasing attention to enhancing communication skills, there continues to be limited attention to grief and loss.

GSHP trainings cover a range of content areas, and all share the goal of developing effective, empathic, and reflective practices in working with grief and loss. Reflective practices are those that focus on examining one’s own thoughts, feelings and behaviors in a situation or event with an open, non-judgmental framework, and consideration of how another individual might be thinking, feeling, or behaving. It is an approach to continuous learning that aims to both develop us as professionals and engage effectively with patients and others.

Broadly, these trainings aim to:

• Expand understanding of grief and the bereavement process
• Highlight the importance of working within the context of each individual/family’s structure, system, and culture
• Develop one’s own reflective capacity and approach to self-care

Examples of training topics include:

• An introduction to loss, grief and bereavement
• Considerations of the impact on healthcare professionals dealing with death
• Supporting parents through pregnancy loss and the death of a baby
• When a child dies – supporting children and families
• Supporting children when a parent is facing serious illness and death

In addition to direct training, easy-access information for families and providers on the topic of child and family bereavement is available, including a resource library and family stories