Healthcare, Grief, and Personal Wellness

System-level Realities

Even when personal wellness is valued, many healthcare environments limit the ability to practice it consistently. Structural factors can restrict opportunities to process grief, decompress, or access support.

Time pressure, staffing shortages, and limited emotional support resources can deprioritize well-being. In some settings, cultural norms may discourage emotional expression, contributing to suppression, disconnection, and increased burnout risk.

While individual coping strategies can help, they do not address the systemic drivers of distress. Sustainable well-being in grief-exposed care is supported by both personal strategies and organizational investment in psychological safety and support.

Implications for Healthcare

System-level challenges require system-level responses. Sustainable support extends beyond reactive wellness efforts to include preventive, evidence-informed strategies that address both individual needs and workplace conditions.

This can include:

• Implementing structured, culturally responsive grief support
• Addressing workload and staffing in high-risk clinical areas
• Investing in training, peer support programs, and trauma-informed supervision
• Fostering team-based practices that support emotional regulation and resilience

Burnout, compassion fatigue, and secondary traumatic stress affect not only workforce retention, but also patient safety, quality of care, and organizational sustainability. Addressing these risks through organizational investment is a critical component of grief-sensitive healthcare practice.

Belonging, Identity, and Psychological Safety

Personal wellness in healthcare is not one-size-fits-all. Healthcare professionals who hold marginalized identities, including related to race, gender identity, sexual orientation, neurodivergence, disability, or other lived experiences, may carry additional emotional and cognitive burdens in environments not designed with their needs in mind.

Alongside clinical demands, these professionals may also navigate:

• Code-switching or masking to conform to dominant workplace norms
• Heightened vigilance related to bias, microaggressions, or discrimination from patients, supporters, or colleagues
• Pressure to represent or educate on behalf of an entire group
• Isolation when they are one of few, or the only person, with a shared identity on a team

These factors can make emotional self-care more difficult in real-world clinical settings. Grief, stress, or trauma exposure may be compounded by concerns about psychological safety, fears of being misunderstood, or uncertainty about where it is safe to be vulnerable. This can complicate emotional regulation, increase cumulative strain, and limit access to meaningful support.

Practical Supports at Multiple Levels

Personal wellness strategies may include:

• Seeking identity-affirming care, therapy, or support outside the workplace
• Using regulation strategies that can be practiced privately and discreetly during the workday
• Prioritizing spaces where full identity and emotional experience are welcomed

Interpersonal and team-level supports may include:

• Identifying one or two trusted colleagues for emotional check-ins
• Participating in affinity groups or peer spaces with shared identity
• Accessing culturally responsive supervision or mentorship

Organizational and system-level supports may include:

• Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) or affinity networks
• Human Resources, DEI offices, or ombuds services for concerns related to bias, safety, or belonging
• Trauma-informed supervision and leadership practices
• Organizational policies that actively support psychological safety, equity, and grief-sensitive care

Being seen and supported in one’s full humanity, not only in a professional role, is a core component of sustainable personal wellness. When healthcare systems recognize how identity intersects with grief, stress, and resilience, they create more equitable conditions for regulation, support, and long-term well-being.

What Grief-Informed Leadership Looks Like

While individual strategies such as peer connection and cognitive reframing can support personal wellness, their impact can be limited without corresponding organizational structures and leadership practices that recognize and respond to grief exposure.

Grief-informed leadership can play a key role in legitimizing emotional responses to loss and fostering environments in which healthcare professionals are supported rather than discouraged from acknowledging the impact of grief.

Effective grief-informed leadership can include:

• Modeling appropriate vulnerability while maintaining psychological safety
• Normalizing emotional responses to patient death, secondary loss, and cumulative stress
• Advocating for protected time for debriefing and grief processing
• Promoting trauma-informed supervision and reflective practice
• Fostering team cultures that value shared processing rather than silence

In practice, this can sound like:

• “I’m wondering what people were feeling after last night’s difficult ICU resuscitation.”
• “I wasn’t there, but I know that kind of case can be really stressful. How is everyone holding up?”
• “That was a hard loss. Let’s make space to check in before moving on.”

Embedding these practices into healthcare systems can support normalization of grief, reduce cumulative emotional burden, and strengthen the sustainability of compassionate care.

Creating Conditions for Sustainable Care

While individual wellness strategies can support regulation and resilience, they cannot fully offset the impact of chronic workload strain, staffing shortages, and repeated exposure to loss. Sustaining a compassionate workforce requires addressing the structural conditions that shape daily experience in care settings.

Reducing barriers to personal wellness calls for organizational investment in preventive, evidence-informed practices, including adequate staffing, protected time for debriefing, access to mental health and peer support resources, and leadership practices that legitimize emotional responses to loss. Without systemic change, the burden of managing cumulative grief and distress is placed unfairly on individual healthcare professionals.