CE: Original Research: Helping Health Care Providers and Staff Process Grief Through a Hospital-Based Program

: Background: Grief and loss are significant issues for health care providers, who may witness their patients' pain and suffering, experience feelings of grief as a result of caring for sick and dying people, and reexperience their own past losses. Unaddressed grief can lead to many issues for providers, their patients, and the health care system as a whole.

Healing Loss: A Residential Workshop for Montefiore Associates is an experiential and educational program aimed at helping professional caregivers to identify and process grief and loss. Through retrospective analysis of program participation and feedback data, this study investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of offering an intensive bereavement support program to hospital employees in a large academic health system.

Between 2013 and 2017, Montefiore Health System held nine Healing Loss workshops, serving 198 employees from diverse professions. These participants described multiple benefits, including being able to grieve more effectively, accessing support, and learning new tools for healing and self-care. Participants described the workshop experience as unique, cathartic, and life changing.

The sustainability of the Healing Loss initiative during the four years of the study, together with strong feedback from participants, indicates that bereavement support for hospital employees is both feasible and beneficial.