Grief-Sensitive Communication: Patients and Their Supporters
The Need For Grief-Sensitive Communication
Grief is not limited to palliative care, hospice, or bereavement services. It can be present across healthcare disciplines, including primary care, specialty care, emergency settings, and inpatient units. Patients and supporters often carry grief into clinical encounters, care planning conversations, and waiting spaces, even when it is not explicitly named.
You're missing a whole part of the human experience if you're not willing to incorporate grief into your practice.
Healthcare professionals play an important role in shaping how grief is experienced. When grief is acknowledged, patients may feel seen and understood, which can support trust, communication, and engagement in care. When grief goes unrecognized, distress may be compounded and feelings of isolation may deepen.
The Hard Truth: More Is Needed
When it comes to satisfaction with grief support, healthcare professionals are not consistently meeting the mark. Research shows that in the acute period after a loss, only about half of patients and families rate their interactions with healthcare providers as “good” or “excellent.” Reported satisfaction rates include:
- 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 findings highlight an important gap. Although healthcare and allied systems intersect with nearly every grieving person, many individuals and supporters report that the grief support they receive does not fully meet their needs.
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.
Impact on Healthcare Professionals
Limited grief education does not only affect interactions with patients and supporters. It can also leave healthcare professionals without shared language, skills, or structures to recognize and support grief in themselves or colleagues. When grief is unacknowledged within teams, distress may be normalized as individual strain rather than a common occupational experience, increasing isolation and risk of cumulative stress.
A Learnable Skill
Grief-sensitive care is not an innate trait. It is a set of skills that can be learned, practiced, and strengthened over time. Normalizing grief, deepening grief literacy, and strengthening skills such as mentalization can build confidence in responding to grief and support more effective, compassionate care for patients, supporters, and colleagues. These skills can also support personal wellbeing over time.
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 (TFMR); she went on to suffer multiple miscarriages. In 2017, Jenn and Nic’s daughter, Loey, was stillborn. In this video, courtesy of WPSU, 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.
Jenn and Nic's story highlights two core components of grief-sensitive care: validation and permission. Although grief is a common response to loss and change, many people benefit from reassurance that their reactions make sense. Explicitly acknowledging grief and giving permission for it to be present can help reduce internalized shame and support more adaptive coping.
How people support you in your grief makes a huge difference.
Every Encounter Is an Opportunity
Every interaction offers an opportunity to acknowledge grief in ways that support safety, dignity, and trust. Grief-sensitive communication is not about having the perfect words, but about practicing presence, awareness, and responsiveness. These skills can be learned and strengthened over time, and even small moments of attunement can meaningfully influence how loss is experienced and carried forward.