Support for Healthcare Professionals and First Responders
support for healthcare professionals
and first responders
What is Professional Grief?
Professional grief, as stated by palliative care expert and social worker Dr. Elizabeth J. Clark, is the grief response one experiences when confronted with multiple and continuous losses at the worksite. First responders, healthcare workers, law enforcement officials, chaplains, social workers, and even veterinarians experience professional grief. This type of grief is dissimilar from the grief experienced with the loss of a loved one in that it often shows itself as fatigue, irritability, blame, cynicism, and anxiety more so than sorrow. Unfortunately, this grief is often unrecognized and unacknowledged. Demands of the job, organizational hierarchies, and expectations of professional detachment often contribute to the suppression and ignoring of professional grief. Left unaddressed, professional grief can lead to burnout, post-traumatic stress, and loss of hope personally and professionally.
The Michael's Place Professional Grief Program
The Professional Grief Program at Michael’s Place is designed to meet the bereavement needs of healthcare and other professionals working in high loss environments.
Michael’s Place offers peer support for professional grief facilitated by Michael’s Place staff, tailored to meet the needs of the workplace served. Support is offered at the workplace site and via Zoom. Michael’s Place also offers presentations and education on the topic of professional grief, as well as consultation on how to establish professional grief programs in your workplace or community bereavement center. Our goal is not only to provide support to those working in high loss environments, but to create a shift in how professional grief is handled within organizational systems.
Getting Started
For more information about our Professional Grief Program, please call (231) 947-6453 or email at GoodGrief@MyMichaelsPlace.net and let us know how we can help.
Recommended Reading on Professional Grief
Understanding Professional Grief
Palliative care expert and social worker Dr. Elizabeth J. Clark discusses grief in high loss work environments, the difference between professional grief and personal grief, bereavement overload, and maintaining professional balance.
Click here to read the article Understanding Professional Grief
The Healer’s Burden: Stories and Poems of Professional Grief
Work in high-loss healthcare environments commonly demands turning away from one’s interior experiences in order to rapidly turn toward the next patient. In a culture that discourages vulnerability, how can a care provider effectively deal with the challenging emotions that naturally arise when faced with death? The Healer’s Burden contains a broad array of artistic and accessible perspectives of healthcare workers from multiple disciplines as they bravely pull back the curtain on their experiences of loss. Co-edited by Former Michael’s Place Program Director, Melissa Fournier.
