Grief Over Patient Loss: a collective debriefing through poetry and prose
This workshop is part of the 2023 GHHS Well-being Workshop Series, a yearlong series hosted by the Gold Humanism Honor Society designed to address different dimensions of well-being through a mix of interactive in-person and virtual sessions facilitated by thoughtful leaders across the United States. Sign up separately for each workshop you plan to attend.
A Zoom link will be provided to registrants. This workshop is co-hosted by Jersey Shore University Medical Center, Hackensack Meridian Health.
Healthcare workers are rarely taught about the reality of grief over patient loss, how to cope with such grief, or the importance of debrief sessions after patient losses and/or adverse events. In this session, we will discuss the topic of grief, including best practices and recommendations from the literature and review different types and models of grief. The majority of the session will be a collective, poetry-writing, process group involving questions about the personal grief experience; through anonymous answers, we will, together in real time, craft a poem about our collective experience. This session may trigger uncomfortable memories or feelings regarding death and grief; mental health resources will be provided at the end of session.
Participants will gain from the session:
- Knowledge regarding models for grief
- Ways to cope with grief over patient loss
- Practicing the skill of collective and creative debriefing over patient death
Workshop Host
Amira Athanasios, MD is a psychiatry resident with Jersey Shore University Medical Center. Having worked the COVID floors as an intern, she has particular interest in professional grief over patient loss. As a graduate of the George Washington University Medical Center, where she was nominated into the Gold Humanism Honor Society by her peers, and Scripps College, she is passionate about the intersections of mental health, humanism in medicine, and advocacy.
Register here
The 2023 GHHS Well-being Workshops are all free and open to all healthcare professionals and students. Questions? Please reach out to Louisa Tvito at ltvito@gold-foundation.org.