Project report
SWK-05. EDUCATIONAL APPROACH TO GRIEF MANAGEMENT
DeRosa V, Madrid N ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This project developed an educational approach to help families cope with grief after a child dies from cancer. It created grief workshops for bereaved parents using a mindfulness-based model called ATTEND, and trained healthcare providers on how to support families through end-of-life care. The workshops provided a safe space for parents to process their emotions, share their stories, and find meaning. Parents reported that the groups gave them community and a place to honour their child's memory.
Key points
- Grief workshops were delivered to 30-36 bereaved parents across 3 cohorts (2 English-speaking, 1 Spanish-speaking), with 10-12 parents per group
- The ATTEND model is a mindfulness-based bereavement approach used for the curriculum
- Workshops included psychoeducation, emotional awareness support, and help finding meaning in the child's life and death
- Parents reported the group provided safe community, opportunity to say their child's name, and a place to share their story
- Healthcare providers received seminars on traumatic grief to understand their influence on families' grief journeys
Limitations
The document does not report quantitative outcome measures, comparison groups, or follow-up data, so we cannot determine the effectiveness of the intervention or whether benefits persist over time. It also does not specify which country or healthcare setting this took place in.
Abstract
Abstract Pediatric neuro-oncology has a high mortality rate compared to other childhood cancers. This project sought to bring Awareness to the Grief and Trauma that families undergo during treatment through end of life. It also sought to create a pool of parent partners to support families receiving palliative care and to mend the healthcare relationship that is severed when a child passes away. The educational series included Grief Workshops for Bereaved Parents using the ATTEND model, a mindfulness-based bereavement model and seminars with traumatic grief experts for providers. This provided a better understanding on how healthcare workers are influential in the “death story” of a child and how this can dictate the family’s lifelong grief journey. Grief workshops consisted of 2 English and 1 Spanish speaking cohort each with 10–12 bereaved parents. The curriculum provided psychoeducation with the goal of creating a safe space to validate, clarify, and understand the events that happened in their child’s life; support for the parent as they explore emotional awareness; relief of emotional tension; support as the parent expresses their perspective of their new world to others that are in their life; and support as the parent finds meaning in their child’s life and untimely death. At the end of each group surveys showed that parents found that the group provided a safe community, a place to say their child’s name, a place to share their story, and a need to advocate for future oncology parents who undergo this journey.
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- Grief workshops using the ATTEND mindfulness-based bereavement model for bereaved parents, combined with provider seminars on traumatic grief
- Population
- Bereaved parents of children who died from cancer (30-36 parents across 3 cohorts); healthcare providers
Key finding
Parents reported the group provided a safe community
V et al. · PubMed Central (PMC) · 1 Dec 2020