Grief-Sensitive Communication: Patients and Their Supporters

Grief Support Is a Core Competency, Not a Specialty

Grief shows up in every healthcare discipline, not only in palliative care, hospice, or bereavement services. Patients bring grief with them into primary care visits, specialty appointments, emergency rooms, and hospital floors. Families carry grief into waiting rooms, exam rooms, and care planning conversations.

That means grief support is not optional or peripheral, it is a core competency. As a healthcare professional, you have a powerful opportunity to shape someone’s grief experience through the way you respond. Acknowledging grief can help patients feel seen, improve trust, and even support adherence to treatment. Avoiding it can compound suffering and deepen isolation.

A Case Study: Grief-Sensitivity And Patient Outcomes

Jenn and Nic Hepton struggled with infertility for 10 years. In 2013, Jenn was pregnant with twins and had to terminate for medical reasons (TFM); she went on to suffer multiple miscarriages. In 2017, Jenn and Nic’s daughter, Loey, was stillborn. In this video from Speaking Grief, they describe the impact compassionate care can have on grief; the experience of losing their twins was completely different than that of their daughter, largely because of how their loss was acknowledged by Jenn’s healthcare providers.

WPSU. (2020). Speaking Grief: The Hepton family. https://speakinggrief.org/stories-of-grief/hepton-family

Jenn’s story illustrates two essential components of grief-sensitive care: validation and permission.

Even though grief is a natural response, people often need reassurance that it’s okay to feel what they’re feeling. Giving patients permission to grieve can help prevent internalized shame and encourage healthy coping.

This permission extends to you, too. Grieving a patient or a difficult situation is valid. So is feeling emotionally neutral or compartmentalized. There’s no single “right” way to feel. Your grief may surface in ways or moments you don’t expect. Responding with self-awareness and compassion is key.

Every encounter matters. Small choices in language and presence can shape how a patient experiences loss, and how they carry it forward.

Research shows that when it comes to satisfaction with grief support, healthcare professionals are not consistently meeting the mark. In the acute period after a loss, only about half of patients and families rate their interactions with healthcare providers as “good” or “excellent.” Specifically:

• Mortuary staff: 65%
• Hospice staff: 63%
• Nurses: 55%
• Faith leaders: 47%
• Crisis responders: 42%
• First responders: 41%
• Law enforcement: 37%
• Physicians: 35%
• Social workers: 35%

These numbers highlight a painful reality: while healthcare touches nearly every grieving person, our systems are not yet providing grief support at the level patients and families need.

But this gap is not a reflection of indifference or lack of care, it often stems from a lack of training. Most healthcare professionals receive little to no formal education on grief, leaving them to rely on personal experience or trial and error in some of the hardest conversations they’ll ever face.

The good news is that grief-sensitive care is not an innate talent , it’s a set of skills that can be learned, practiced, and strengthened. By increasing awareness, developing language, and gaining confidence in addressing grief, healthcare professionals can transform the quality of support patients and families receive. Every step you take to expand your grief literacy makes a difference,  not only in your practice, but in the lives of the people you serve.