Core Concepts for Grief-Sensitive Care

Healthcare professionals bring deep expertise, skill, and commitment to caring for patients and their supporters. Many also bring personal and professional experiences with loss, change, and uncertainty. Even so, grief often shows up in ways that fall outside formal training.

These self-guided resources are designed to build on what you already know by strengthening your ability to recognize, normalize, and respond to grief across healthcare settings. This resource module:

• Expands the definition of grief beyond bereavement to include illness, injury, life transitions, and ongoing change
• Explores how grief can affect emotional, cognitive, physical, relational, and behavioral functioning
• Examines common myths and outdated models that can shape misunderstandings of grief in healthcare settings
• Highlights how grief may be expressed differently across the lifespan, relationships, and social contexts
• Introduces concepts such as secondary losses, disenfranchised grief, and disparities in grief experiences
• Strengthens skills for recognizing, naming, and responding to grief when it is present but not always explicit

Navigate to the topic of interest using the links on the left or use the links below to access additional self-guided resources.