Grief in the Family: A Holistic Approach to Supporting Families

Description

How do families grieve?

Grief in families involves individual and shared responses to loss where each member feels the impact of loss differently. This shared grief can strengthen bonds through mutual support or create emotional distance and misunderstandings as each person navigates their own journey of grief. This workshop is aimed at health care professionals and volunteers who wish to gain an understanding of the normal responses to grief for individual family members and how these impact on the family system. Grief is a complex, deeply personal journey, and those in supportive roles play a critical part in helping individuals and families navigate this challenging time. It aims to provide compassionate, informed care, enhancing the ability to assist families in the challenging journey of grieving together.

Learning Outcomes

On completion of the workshop participants will be able to:

· explain how grief impacts individual family members and the communication within a family system as a whole

· outline theories in family grief dynamics, such as attachment theory, family systems theory, and the dual process model of grief

· use family rituals and opportunities to honour the person who died

· practice enhanced bereavement support and facilitating family discussions

Presenter Profiles

Hazel Greene is the Bereavement Services Coordinator based in Galway Hospice. Her background is in Social work having worked in healthcare, mental health and community settings since 2006, she is also a trained Art therapist and uses these skills to enhance her engagement in her work. She has years of experience working with families in challenging times.

She has worked with the hospice since 2019 delivering bereavement support to individuals and families. Her experience includes: working therapeutically one to one, with families, also leading and facilitating support groups within the service.

Her focus in practice is supporting people in their personal growth and facilitating ways of promoting resilience and self-care. As well as individual work, she really enjoys group facilitation and the shared learning process. She finds each group education brings new learning both for herself and those that attend.

Aisling Kearney is a dedicated and compassionate social worker with over 20 years of experience in the fields of bereavement, loss, specialist palliative care and child and adolescent mental health. Aisling is currently Principal Medical Social worker at Galway Hospice.

In recent years, Aisling has provided crucial emotional and psychological support to individuals and families navigating the complex challenges of illness, death, grief and loss in the community setting. Her experience includes providing one to one counselling and facilitating bereavement support groups for children and adults. In her collaboration with team members, she has guided families through the intricacies of end of life care, and advocating for policies that improve family centred care in grief and bereavement. In her leadership, Aisling supports creativity and innovation with team members and this is demonstrated in the development of innovative initiatives for individuals and families experiencing loss.

Aisling is currently Vice Chair of the Hospice and Palliative Care Social Workers Group. Aisling has completed further third level studies in CBT (Queen’s University), Leadership, Supervision and Management (NUIG) and Organisational Behaviour (UL). Aisling is a supervisor to Social work colleagues and CORU registered.

Hazel Greene

Aisling Kearney