With staggering mortality rates, the COVID-19 pandemic brought with it a secondary grief crisis. The Grief-Sensitive Healthcare Project was developed at the Yale Child Study Center (YCSC) in 2020 to address issues related to this crisis, in collaboration with Child Bereavement UK and the New York Life Foundation. With the recent launch of a brand new website, the project is expanding its reach, providing easy access to comprehensive materials and resources for health care professionals, along with opportunities to sign up for training.
The project is led by YCSC Associate Research Scientist Amanda Lowell and serves as a response to clinical and research evidence suggesting a need for bereavement-specific training in health care, with an emphasis on incorporating families’ perspectives about their experiences with providers during times of grief. “The purpose is to provide training and educational resources to health care professionals about the many ways in which grief can be experienced and expressed in families, and how this may inform how care is provided in a sensitive manner,” Lowell explained.
Recent estimates suggest that 5.6 million children are bereaved each year in the United States, a number that was exacerbated by the pandemic, which has caused more than 1.3 million excess deaths to date. “Throughout the pandemic, health care professionals were exposed to death and grief like never before," said Lowell. “Unfortunately, however, the majority of physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals do not receive training in the areas of death, loss, and grief. This gap has the potential to negatively affect both health care professionals and the patients and families they serve.”
The Grief-Sensitive Healthcare Project is grounded in a philosophy that grief is both universal and highly individual. Grief is a normal and natural response to loss, and everyone experiences grief in their lifetime. Because of this, Lowell explains, it is critical that health care professionals develop skills to be grief-sensitive when caring for families of all kinds. “Although there are several broad theories about grief, it is highly individual and not all grief ‘looks’ the same.” As such, simply learning about grief is not sufficient. ”Health care professionals must also come to the work with cultural humility and open-mindedness when working with grieving families.”
Lowell also suggests that grief should also be supported by reflective health care professionals. “When we speak with health care professionals, there is a resounding sense that we are trained to fix people. And when there is a condition that cannot be cured or a life that cannot be saved, we are left not knowing what to do or say,” she says.
The training and resources developed through the project focus on providing skills for health care professionals to reflect on their own thoughts and emotions, which have the potential to impact the care they provide to grieving families. This includes acknowledging how one’s own grief is activated while providing clinical care, noticing signs of burnout, and noticing when feeling pulled to ‘fix’ rather than sit with grief. To date, virtual and in-person training has been provided to over 500 health care professionals through the project.