About the Course

This course is aimed at staff who would like to learn how they can offer appropriate support to clients who have experienced a bereavement or significant loss. The topic can evoke difficult emotions in participants and it is run in a sensitive and participant-centred way. It uses a variety of teaching methods, including experiential techniques to look at this universal experience. Staff often feel that they lack confidence to offer support to a client who has experienced a bereavement or significant loss.  This can lead to a poor level of service and to raised staff stress. The course gives participants the opportunity to share personal experiences of support they have received when they have experienced a loss or bereavement and of situations where they have offered support to bereaved people.

Course Content

• Communicating with bereaved clients
• Theoretical models of bereavement such as the Kubler-Ross Grief Cycle.
• Healthy and unhealthy bereavement
• Anger as a common part of grieving
• Using listening and counselling skills with people who have been bereaved
• Support services for people who have been bereaved
• The range of situations where knowledge of bereavement is helpful including the loss of pet, one's home, a job, a relationship or a friendship or where a client has lost contact with someone.
• Different attitudes to death and bereavement in a multicultural society.
• Ways to offer clients support following a death on the project.
• Checklist of ways to offer effective support to a bereaved person.
• Evaluation

Learning Outcomes

At the end of the course participants will:

• Have increased their skills in communicating effectively with and supporting clients who have experienced a bereavement or significant loss.
• Understand theoretical models of the process of bereavement.
• Have knowledge of the support services available for people who have been bereaved.
• Have increased their awareness of attitudes to death and bereavement within a multicultural society.
• Have increased confidence in supporting clients following a death on a project.