The Grief Support in Healthcare Scale: development and testing

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Healthcare Research
• Sociology

Background:

• Social support is crucial for grief processing.
• Existing measures inadequately address healthcare workers' grief over patient deaths.
• Healthcare workers face unique challenges in grieving patients and residents.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a grief support measure tailored for healthcare workers.
• To validate a scale specific to healthcare professionals' experiences with patient loss.

Main Methods:

• Cross-sectional design with 380 nursing assistants.
• Self-administered surveys on grief and loss in nursing homes.
• Exploratory factor and regression analyses for psychometric testing of the Grief Support in Healthcare Scale (GSHCS).

Main Results:

• The 15-item GSHCS loaded onto three factors: relationship recognition, loss acknowledgement, and griever inclusion.
• Reliability was high (Cronbach's α .89–.78).
• GSHCS subscales significantly related to grief distress and growth, with unique factor relationships.

Conclusions:

• The GSHCS demonstrates acceptable reliability and face validity for assessing grief in healthcare workers.
• The scale may inform interventions to address disenfranchised grief in this population.
• Further validation is needed across diverse healthcare worker groups.