When supporting grief is already part of your work
Palliative care professionals have considerable expertise in supporting people through serious illness, dying and death.
They hold difficult conversations. They support families through uncertainty and change. They help people prepare for what may be coming while continuing to recognise the person who is still living.
Grief is already part of this work.
But even experienced professionals can benefit from a deeper understanding of how grief works psychologically, why people respond so differently to loss, and what helps when grief becomes particularly difficult or complex.
Bereavement training for palliative care staff can build on the expertise teams already have — adding contemporary psychological knowledge, practical approaches to grief and space to consider the impact of repeatedly supporting other people through loss.
Grief can begin long before a death
For many patients and families receiving palliative care, grief doesn’t begin when somebody dies.
A serious or life-limiting diagnosis can bring losses of its own.
People may grieve changes to their health, independence, identity, relationships, plans for the future or the life they expected to have.
Family members may simultaneously be caring for someone they love and beginning to anticipate life without them.
This anticipatory grief can involve:
- sadness and fear
- anxiety about what lies ahead
- anger or helplessness
- guilt about thoughts or feelings
- changes in family roles and relationships
- grieving future experiences that may no longer happen
- conflicting feelings about treatment and care
- exhaustion from prolonged uncertainty
- moments of hope alongside preparation for death
These experiences aren’t always straightforward.
Someone can understand intellectually that a person is dying while still struggling to imagine their death. They can hope for more time while preparing for the end of life. They can experience relief alongside profound sadness.
Grief can contain seemingly contradictory emotions at the same time.
Use this form to tell us a little about your training needs. You’ll receive our Training Brochure + Indicative Pricing immediately – on screen and straight to your inbox.
Deepening existing expertise in grief
Palliative care staff aren’t starting from zero.
Many already have considerable experience of death, dying and supporting families.
Specialist bereavement training should therefore do more than teach basic communication skills.
It can help staff explore:
- contemporary psychological models of grief
- anticipatory grief before a death
- how people move between confronting and avoiding their loss
- continuing bonds with someone who has died
- meaning and identity following bereavement
- different responses within the same family
- guilt, anger, relief and other difficult emotions
- grief following traumatic or complicated circumstances
- when grief may require additional specialist support
- how to work compassionately while maintaining professional boundaries
The aim isn’t to prescribe how somebody should grieve.
It’s to give professionals more ways of understanding what they are seeing.
Bereavement Training for Palliative Care Teams
The Loss Foundation provides expert-led bereavement training for palliative care professionals and multidisciplinary teams.
Training can be tailored to the existing experience of your staff and the circumstances they encounter.
For palliative care teams, this could include:
- contemporary theories and models of grief
- anticipatory grief
- grief before and after a death
- supporting families through uncertainty
- difficult and conflicting emotions
- family dynamics around dying and bereavement
- individual and cultural differences in grief
- continuing bonds and maintaining connection after death
- meaning-making following loss
- recognising when grief may require additional support
- compassionate conversations around death and loss
- professional boundaries
- signposting and onward support
- cumulative grief and repeated exposure to death
- compassion fatigue and staff wellbeing
One death can create many different experiences of grief
The same death can affect members of a family very differently.
One person may want to talk openly about what is happening. Another may avoid the subject entirely.
Someone may want as much information as possible. Someone else may feel unable to hear it.
After a death, one family member may want to talk constantly about the person who died while another finds those conversations painful.
These differences can sometimes create tension at a time when families are already under enormous emotional pressure.
Bereavement training can help palliative care staff understand that different ways of coping aren’t necessarily signs that somebody is grieving well or badly.
They may simply reflect different needs, relationships and ways of adapting to loss.
What happens after the death?
Palliative care professionals may have supported a patient and their family for weeks, months or sometimes longer.
Then the patient dies.
For relatives, bereavement is beginning. For professionals, their formal involvement may be coming to an end.
That transition can be significant.
Families may need information about bereavement support, reassurance about some of the emotions they’re experiencing or guidance about where to seek further help.
Staff need to understand both what they can offer and where the boundaries of their role sit.
Bereavement training can help teams develop greater confidence in recognising when someone’s experience appears consistent with grief, when additional support may be helpful and how to signpost appropriately.
When you experience loss again and again
There is another side to bereavement in palliative care.
Staff experience losses too.
Professionals may build meaningful relationships with patients and families while remaining within appropriate clinical boundaries.
Some patients stay with us.
Some deaths feel particularly difficult.
Some remind us of people in our own lives.
And sometimes it isn’t one particular death that has an impact — it is the accumulation of many.
Working repeatedly alongside dying, death and grieving families can contribute to cumulative grief, emotional exhaustion and compassion fatigue.
Bereavement training can give teams space to consider:
- how patient deaths affect professionals
- cumulative exposure to grief and loss
- why particular deaths can affect us more deeply
- recognising signs of compassion fatigue
- maintaining compassionate professional boundaries
- what healthy processing of difficult experiences can look like
- supporting colleagues after a difficult death
- recognising when additional support is needed
Experience can make you more skilled at working around death. It doesn’t make you immune to its impact.
Supporting the people who support everyone else
Staff wellbeing isn’t separate from good palliative care.
People need to be able to remain compassionate without feeling responsible for carrying every family’s grief with them.
That doesn’t mean becoming detached.
It means developing sustainable ways of caring.
Training can help teams think about individual strategies, peer support, reflective practice and organisational approaches that make it easier for professionals to recognise and respond to the emotional demands of their work.
Expert-led bereavement training for palliative care staff
Our bereavement training is developed by Dr Erin Hope Thompson MBE, Clinical Psychologist and founder of The Loss Foundation.
Erin has extensive experience across the NHS, private and third sectors. Our training combines contemporary psychological theory with practical approaches that professionals can apply in conversations with patients and families.
Training can be adapted to complement the existing knowledge of experienced palliative care professionals rather than repeating skills they already have.
Sessions can be delivered online or in person and tailored to your team, service and learning objectives.
Who is palliative care bereavement training for?
Training can be developed for multidisciplinary palliative care teams, including:
Palliative care nurses – developing deeper psychological understanding of grief alongside existing clinical expertise.
Doctors and consultants – incorporating contemporary bereavement knowledge into conversations with patients and families.
Healthcare assistants – building confidence around grief, difficult emotions and everyday conversations.
Allied health professionals – understanding grief within the wider physical, psychological and social needs of patients and families.
Bereavement and family support teams – extending specialist knowledge of grief models, responses and interventions.
Managers and team leaders – supporting staff who experience repeated exposure to death and bereavement.
Training can also be delivered across NHS services, hospices and other organisations providing palliative and end-of-life care.
Bereavement training for palliative care staff online and in person
Because palliative care teams often already have significant experience of bereavement, training can be adapted to your team’s existing knowledge rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
Tell us where your team’s confidence already lies and where you’d like to develop greater depth.
We can then shape the training around the issues that are most relevant to your service.
Contact us about bereavement training for palliative care staff
If you’d like to deepen your team’s understanding of grief, strengthen bereavement practice or support professionals working repeatedly around death and loss, we can tailor training to your service.
Use this form to tell us a little about your training needs. You’ll receive our Training Brochure + Indicative Pricing immediately – on screen and straight to your inbox.
